Sony Removes Folding@home From PlayStation 3

McMullen

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Mar 9, 2010
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GenGenners said:
Geez guys, calm down.
You're all spoiling for a fight. Try reading the details before screaming about the devil.

The update removes Life With Playstation, which is primarily a combined world news/lounge app thing which is fairly useless and never gets used. Folding@home itself is a secondary client hidden away as a setting inside Life With Playstation. It used to be it's own completely separate client on the XMB until it was merged with Life With Playstation.

Stop crying about corporate evil. Sony's decision is to remove the redundant and barely used Life With Playstation. It's just a tragic chance of fate that Folding@home also happens to be located in the same place.
Separating the two clients, removing Life With Playstation, then re-doing and relauching Folding@home would probably require a few extra resources which, over half a decade after launch, probably wouldn't be worth it at this point.

Now stop pointing fingers. It's not the evil you think it is.
Aw, but bashing vaguely defined "other" groups is fun, and Sony makes it so damned easy.
 

clippen05

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Jul 10, 2012
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Mistermixmaster said:
That's a shame, I just heard about this folding thing for the first time yesterday, and now it's going away? =/

Kahani said:
A PS3 can't touch a modern PC for folding (I think a PS3 will get around 1000 points per day, while my two year old PC can manage over 50,000)
What? I'm just gonna quote this link [http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-Press#ntoc21] that was in this article here. "There are several aspects which makes the PS3 well suited for this task. First, its main processor - the Cell Processor - is very powerful. In fact, we get a 20x speed increase over PC's. That's not 20%, but 20x, i.e. a 2,000% increase over a typical PC."

Either your 'old' PC is a processing-monster, or the site lies about the PS3 processor. I dunno.
Did you hear about it on Game Grumps per chance. Because that's how I learned the other day as well. :D
 

mew4ever23

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Mar 21, 2008
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Yeah, this isn't about Sony being dicks for once. They're axing something no one uses, and unfortunately, the PS3 Folding@home client runs through that thing no one uses. Maybe it'll be back in a patch or two?
 

Mistermixmaster

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Aug 4, 2009
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clippen05 said:
Mistermixmaster said:
That's a shame, I just heard about this folding thing for the first time yesterday, and now it's going away? =/
Did you hear about it on Game Grumps per chance. Because that's how I learned the other day as well. :D
I did indeed, amazing what you can learn from those two xD
 

kburns10

You Gots to Chill
Sep 10, 2012
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Phishfood said:
kburns10 said:
I only used this application once or twice. I never fully understood how it worked, but it sounds like it helped a lot with research at Stanford. Like others, I gotta believe there was a reasoning behind doing this. The article made it sound like a good amount of data was already collected through this. Maybe there is no more need for it?
The gist of these apps is that they start with a protein chain then use the basic laws of motion to give each atom an acceleration and hence a velocity. Even a small protein has a thousand atoms in it, so a thousand atoms to calculate every interaction with each other and potentially some solution they are disolved in to get a force, to get an acceleration, to get a speed, to get a position. All these calculations need to be refreshed every million billionth (1/1,000,000,000,000,000) of a second. Hence, massive computing requirements.
That's pretty intense! Thanks for the background info! I can see how millions of systems doing the refreshing for them could be immensely helpful.
 

Kahani

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May 25, 2011
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Alatar The Red said:
Well Griffolion was talking about serious folders. Or that's at least what I thought when he said this:

A person serious about folding will get three or four of these in one PC and just have them running 24/7.
So I was just kind of replying to him. I absolutely know that it's a really small majority that will buy systems based on F@H. Even I don't do that, my rig is for benching with dry ice and LN2 mostly. Gaming too. I just like to help with F@H from time to time.
Ah, fair enough. Sorry, I missed that part.

That's most likely going to change actually since pande said that they can now run the same work units on GPUs as they can on CPUs. Should be interesting.
Interesting, hadn't heard about that. I think one of my GPUs is starting to play up a bit as well, so I may be needing a shiny new one soon.