Stanford University's Folding@home program has broken the petaflop milestone thanks to Sony's PlayStation 3. For those who don't know what a petaflop is, it is the capability of a computer to do a quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS). That's the equivalent of every person on earth doing 75,000 simple math problems per second.

Folding@home was designed to simulate protein folding and perform molecular dynamics simulations. The data gathered here would be used to understand the progression of diseases such as Alzheimer's, mad cow, cancer, and even Cystic Fibrosis.

Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead pointed out that thanks to the PS3s and its owners who ran Folding@home, the research process on the different diseases being studied has been sped up by a decade. The president and CEO of SCEA Jack Tretton also spoke about this achievement saying that:

When we introduced PS3, we knew its incredible processing power would allow for a great deal of innovation and creativity. It's extremely rewarding to see that the scientific community has found a way to harness PS3 technology for humanitarian purposes and we continue to be amazed at what gamers and the Folding@home community have been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time.