When many of you are done playing games or watching videos for the night, you chose to give back by launching Stanford University’s Folding@home application on your PLAYSTATION 3. Whether you do it to benefit society, or just because the visualizations look cool, over a million of you have found the experience to be rewarding. Now it’s Folding@home’s turn to be recognized.
Earlier today, the Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization awarded Sony Computer Entertainment the “Good Design Gold Award 2008” for our support of the Folding@home project on PS3.
Folding@home is a distributed computing project which aims to understand protein folding and misfolding, and how they are related to diseases such as Alzheimer’s and many forms of cancer.
We take special pride in the words said by the judges of the event, which gave the Gold award to only 15 projects out of over 3,000 nominees. In their words:
“Analysis of proteins for the purpose of shedding light on diseases is just one example of solution design for social issues, a stance that indicates the direction that design should take in the future. Motivating the people who will be involved in these studies will be the key to success, but the program functions well as an idea for making participation in this project visible on a global scale.”
Many people have worked to get this application working, both in Sony Computer Entertainment and in Stanford University, but all of this would not be doable without the participation and the donation given by you- the active community. So allow me to extend my thanks and hope to see you all continue to contribute to this important project.
2manyquestions | November 9th, 2008 at 7:26 am
“hi is it possible to put folding@home on the psp???”
Currently, the only way to do that is via Remote Play. However, it would be nice to do it independently. The question is, can the PSP handle the application?
Oh, before I forget… It used to be that I could program Folding@home to automatically play my own saved music without my having to do anything but the initial settings. Now, if I want to hear my music I have to physically start it up…
But, I love my Folding@home, none-the-less!
I’ve thought about using folding@home but was concerned about the PS3 overheating or using up the life expectancy of my system. Should I have an external cooler connected to my PS3 to prevent it from overheating?
My PS3 sometimes runs 24 hour straight. I have it in an open area. My stand is of open metal and glass, no doors or cabinets. I also have a fan that not only keeps me cool during warm weather, but it also blows on my television and PlayStation 3.
re: cooling
In case you haven’t noticed, the PS3’s fans are temperature sensitive and automatically spin faster to compensate for higher heat levels in the system.
If the system is actually having heat issues, it will alert you before it becomes critical (flashing red light on the front).
I’ve been running Folding@Home all the time since it was first released, no problems with heat.
So what has folding accomplished, havent heard of any cancers being treated or cured from this. Seems to be a money machine for the academia elite and sony.