PlayStation 3 tackles world ills
The Playstation 3 has yet to hit the market, but plans are already being made for the console to save the world, or at least cure a few diseases.
Anyone familiar with the Seti@home project recognizes the value in distributed computing. Owners of the PS3 will be able to volunteer their system's idle computing time to researchers who will using the processing power to study models of diseases and other world problems. The PS3 will receive small packets of information to process, and it will organize and "solve" that packet before sending it back to the main project center. When you've got thousands of PS3 systems doing this at once, what you're left with is essentially one big computer cluster with processing power equal to about 4 times that of the world's most powerful supercomputer, the IBM BlueGene/L System, which makes 280 trillion calculations per second.
BBC NEWS | Technology | PlayStation 3 tackles world ills
Anyone familiar with the Seti@home project recognizes the value in distributed computing. Owners of the PS3 will be able to volunteer their system's idle computing time to researchers who will using the processing power to study models of diseases and other world problems. The PS3 will receive small packets of information to process, and it will organize and "solve" that packet before sending it back to the main project center. When you've got thousands of PS3 systems doing this at once, what you're left with is essentially one big computer cluster with processing power equal to about 4 times that of the world's most powerful supercomputer, the IBM BlueGene/L System, which makes 280 trillion calculations per second.
BBC NEWS | Technology | PlayStation 3 tackles world ills