Sony’s PlayStation 3 games console is forming the backbone of a “supercomputer” that is helping scientists to solve some of the world’s most puzzling diseases.

Since the sophisticated console went on sale in the United States and Japan late last year and in Europe last Friday, about 25,000 owners have activated software preinstalled on the machine that has added a significant amount of computing power to a research project run by Stanford University in California.

The Folding@Home scheme is an example of “distributed computing”, whereby thousands of idle computer pro-cessors are harnessed via the internet to build simulations that otherwise would take much longer to calculate.

By analysing the intricate process of how proteins fold themselves in the human body, the Stanford project aims to uncover the causes of cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other diseases. It was set up in 2000 and has helped to bring about a number of scientific breakthroughs.

The task previously had been open to anyone with a computer, but the 300,000-odd PCs involved generated only about 100 teraflops of power.

When the PS3s joined in, that figure soared to about 990 teraflops and now the games consoles account for 70 per cent of the total computing power of the Stanford project.

The most powerful supercomputer has a processing power of about 120 teraflops.

A Sony spokesman said that the majority of PS3 users signed up to Folding@Home are in the United States and Japan, with about 1,000 in the UK. She said that the processing power of the project would increase considerably as more PS3 owners joined in. Games analysts in Tokyo said that the computing power of Sony’s machines could be considerably underexploited by games manufacturers. The console contains a powerful and expensive chip that was co-designed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba. It is partly responsible for the high cost of the console — about £425 in Britain — and the damage it has done to Sony Computer Entertainment’s bottom line. Sir Howard Stringer, Sony’s president, has appeared to admit that the PS3 may have been overengineered. “If we fail, it is because we positioned PS3 as the Mercedes of the video game field,” he has said.

— Folding@home: http://folding. stanford.edu

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