PS3 network supercomputer named world's most powerful

Not by Jack Dongarra and the LINpack benchmark The Guinness Book of Records, the unimpeachable source for all things drinkers might bet on, has listed Stanford's Folding@Home network of distributed PS3's as the world's ". . .powerful distributed computing network."

Yes, you can do real science on a PS3 The BBC article goes on to say

FAH has signed up nearly 700,000 PS3s to examine how the shape of proteins affect diseases such as Alzheimer's.

The network has more than one petaflop of computing power - the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

One petaflop, that is, after everyone stops playing Guitar Hero and Resistance: Fall of Man.

Protein folding is huge The advent of mad-cow disease disclosed a new way to get dead: prions. According to the Centers for Disease Control:

Prion diseases . . . are a family of rare progressive neurodegenerative disorders that affect both humans and animals. . . . A prion is an abnormal, transmissible agent that is able to induce abnormal folding of normal cellular prion proteins in the brain, leading to brain damage . . . . Prion diseases are usually rapidly progressive and always fatal.

[emphasis added]

F@H may run on Playstation 3's, but the problem of protein-based disease is no game.

Learn more about the PS3 supercomputer - including setting up your own 8-node cluster - in this article.