Thanks to the ginormous help afforded by Sony PlayStation 3, Stanford University's Folding@home project was eventually recognized by the Guinness World Records as the World's Most Powerful Distributed Computing network. This big achievement is thanks to the overwhelming participation of PS3 owners all around the world (QJ included).

Folding@home (also known as F@h) managed to reach the one petaflop mark on September 16 last month, while continued widespread participation of PS3 users enabled the PS3 to surpass one petaflop on September 23, not counting the input from other computers and devices.

To those who still aren't familiar about the Folding@home project, it is an application that lets PS3s and PCs participate in a distributed computing project that simulates the process of protein folding. Since the simulation of the entire process is too slow and tasking for a single computer to handle, Dr. Vijay Pande and the merry band of researchers from Stanford Project managed to create a single computing network dedicated for the sole purpose of simulating the protein folding process.

The success of the project was also thanks to the user-friendly F@h application: just let the PC or PS3 run the application while not playing any games, and just leaving the machine on when not in use. PS3 users only needed to contribute electricity to help improve mankind's well-being, so to speak.

This is not the only instance wherein the PS3 helps out the field of science. A cluster of eight PS3 units are currently working as a supercomputer replacement for Dr. Gaurav Khanna as he conducts his space research. Will the mighty PS3 and its powerful Cell processor find more ways in benefiting humanity? We'll see soon enough.

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