Great news for all those PS3 owners out there now, including us. Not only are our home supercomputers helping to cure diseases; Game Industry reports that more than 30,000 of us signed up for the service.

According to their news report, 40,000 PS3 CPUs are already linked to the project, with three quarters of that actively performing calculations for Folding@Home! That's great news, and if we can help tons of people with our computing power when we're not doing anything, then so be it, right?

In any case, you may want to check our own QJ Folding team by joining 52781 (our QJ Folding@Home Team Number) or reading up on what Folding@Home does. In the meantime, we'll be shutting off our PS3 for a little break. We smelled smoke an hour ago, so the 48 hour Fold-a-thon we had planned worked, but possibly to our detriment.

IBM wins the bid to build "Roadrunner", a supercomputer system that will compete (and hopes to outdo) Japan's "Protein Explorer" and its own Blue Gene/L. IBM-Los Alamos will announce the plans as to when the project will officially start, but it's going to be a phase by phase process that begins this September and ends in 2007.

It seems a little off-topic, PS3 fans should start rejoicing. The Roadrunner kicks off a new trend in supercomputing, which relies on "hybrids" to sustain the performance level of a "petaflop," or 1 quadrillion calculations per second. These hybrids are a combination of general-purpose processors and special-purpose accelerator chips. In this case, it's going to be not just Opteron chips, but the Cell processor from Sony's PS3 as well. The Cell processor as we know it was originally designed to improve video game performance in the PlayStation 3 console.

Obviously, this is going to lead us to a futuristic conclusion: With more powerful petaflop-churning supercomputers, there will be greater possibility for more high-speed gaming systems and machines to come out in the future. Also, because the U.S. government has become an avid supercomputer customer, the nuclear simulations will be continuously fueled.

Gaming, as we know it, will never be the same again.