Sony Removes Folding@home From PlayStation 3

[kburns10]

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]

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.