Folding@Home: Sony Playstation 3 users can help find cure for incurable diseases

Folding@Home: Sony Playstation 3 users can help find cure for incurable diseases

Sony has announced that they would soon provide an enhancement for their Playstation 3 gaming console so that the gamers can join a supercomputing network researching causes of cancer, Alzheimer’s and other incurable diseases.

Sony plans to issue a software update later this month which would enable the gamers to devote their consoles’ idle time to a project managed by Stanford University.

The project is searching for cure for diseases include Parkinson’s, mad cow, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and some forms of cancer.

Gamers would be able to click on a “Folding@Home” icon on their television screens and their consoles would then be used to contribute their enormous computing power for research work.

Sony Computer Entertainment chief technical officer Masayuki Chatani spoke on this initiative: “Millions of users have experienced the power of PS3 entertainment; now they can utilize that exceptional computing power to help fight diseases.”

Stanford associate professor Vijay Pande added: “With PS3 now part of our network, we will be able to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally, with the goal of finding cures to some of the world’s most life-threatening diseases.”