Folding@home
From PS3Wiki
Folding@home also known as 'FAH' or 'F@h' is a distributed computing project. It is designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics. Folding@home is the most powerful distributed computing cluster in the world, according to Guinness World Records, and one of the world's largest distributed computing projects.
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PlayStation 3 Introduction
Stanford announced in August 2006 that a folding client was available to run on the Sony PlayStation 3.The intent was that gamers would be able to contribute to the project by merely "contributing electricity", leaving their PlayStation 3 consoles running the client while not playing games. PS3 System Firmware 1.60 allows for Folding@home software, a 50 MB download, to be used on the PS3.
Project Slowed Down
A peak output of the project at 990 teraFLOPS was achieved on 25 March, 2007, at which time the number of FLOPS from each PS3 as reported by Stanford fell, reducing the overall speed rating of those machines by 50%. This had the effect of bumping down the overall project speed to the mid 700 range and increasing the number of active PS3s required to achieve a petaFLOPS level to around 60,000.
New Versions
Version 1.2
On April 26, 2007, Sony released a new version of Folding@home which improved folding performance drastically, such that the updated PS3 clients produced 1500 teraFLOPS with 52,000 clients versus the previous 400 teraFLOPS by around 24,000 clients. Lately, the console accounts for around 40% of all teraFLOPS.
Version 1.3
On December 19, 2007, Sony again updated the Folding@home client to version 1.3 to allow users to run music stored on their hard drives while contributing. Another feature of the 1.3 update allows users to automatically shut down their console after current work is done or after a limited period of time (for example 3 or 4 hours). Also, the software update added the Generalized Born implicit solvent model, so the FAH PS3 client gained more broad computing capabilities.
Version 1.31
Shortly afterward, 1.3.1 was released to solve a mishandling of protocol resulting in difficulties sending and receiving Work Units due to heavy server loads stemming from the fault.
