The PS3′s Folding@home service has nabbed a prestigious Good Design Award, AKA “G-Mark.” Since 1957, the Good Design Award has been instituted by the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry to award outstanding design in industrial and consumer products.
As we previously posted, Life With PlayStation is live. We downloaded it (did you?) and took it for a spin. And yes, it’s basically Sony’s take on Wii News and Wii Weather — which isn’t a bad thing, per se. Life With PlayStation has literally just launched and it kinda shows. For example, there aren’t many cities on the Life With PlayStation globe. (Hello? Where’s Dallas?) But, we don’t doubt Sony will continue to add cities, though. Users can pull up news from Google, which is also kinda nice if you don’t have a computer. Our one big gripe: It’s somewhat hard to read the news text off a television from the sofa.
Feel free to rattle off your own thoughts and impressions in the comments section.
We’ve filed this as “rumor” because we haven’t been able to verify for ourselves — even after downloading the latest PS3 update. But apparently, the 2.43 PS3 update adds Life With PlayStation for some. The Sony service shows the Earth, and users can access current news and weather for locations around the world. It’s possible to even pull up the full article from the headline.
Word is that Life becomes available after updating Folding@Home and that it supposedly becomes available then. As previously, mentioned, we were not successful and many others weren’t as well. But there are pics, and hi-res pics at that, of Life with PlayStation of people who claim to have been able to download it. Folks over in the Sony forums state that it appears this was only possible for a short window of time. At the very least, we do know that Life with PlayStation is around the corner.
Re: LIFE WITH PLAYSTATION OUT NOW!!! [PlayStation.com Forums Thanks, sirpilf!]
Could you win a Nobel Prize in Medicine for playing a computer game? Foldit is a game for the PC and Mac that takes the Folding@Home concept and adds a more human element to the mix. Instead of having a network of computers work through all of the possible shapes for folding proteins, a problem so huge it could take centuries for all of the computers in the world to solve, Foldit presents unfolded proteins to the player in the form of puzzles, on the basis that human intuition could tackle the problem much faster.
“Some people are just able to look at the game and in less than two minutes, get to the top score,” said (UW associate professor of computer science and engineering) Zoran Popovic. “They can’t even explain what they’re doing, but somehow they’re able to do it.”
SCEA’s Playstation 3 Folding@home project, which went live back on March 22, recently topped one million user, meaning that about 3,000 PS3 users have registered for Folding@home a day since they software went live on the console.
“Since partnering with SCEI, we have seen our research capabilities increase by leaps and bounds through the continued participation of Folding@home users,” said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead. “Now we have over one million PS3 users registered for Folding@home, allowing us 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. We are grateful for the extraordinary worldwide participation by PS3 and PC users around the globe.”
Thanks to all of those PS3 owners willing to tie their console to the network, and pay the resulting electric bill, PS3 users make up about 74 percent of the total teraflop computing power of the Folding@home project.
Well done Sony, well done. Oh, speaking of well done, Team Kotaku is currently ranked number 106 at folding@home. If you haven’t signed up (for Folding@home) and own a PS3, you really should.
To co-incide with the release of PS3 firmware v2.10, Sony have announced an updated Folding@Home client, which you’ll “soon” be able to download. The update brings two major changes: firstly, you can set a timer for the program, after which the PS3 can shut itself down. So no more waking up in the middle of the night clutching sweat-soaked sheets, eyes peeling back in abject horror at the thought of your power bill. The other change is the addition of a background music feature, which draws its tracks from any you’ve got store on your HDD. New Folding@Home Features Coming [PlayStation.Blog]
Stanford University’s Folding@home program is going to be recognised by the Guinness World Records folks as the most powerful distributed computer network in the world, thanks, in part, to the Playstation 3.
“To have Folding@home recognised by Guinness World Records as the most powerful distributed computing network ever is a reflection of the extraordinary worldwide participation by gamers and consumers around the world and for that we are very grateful,” said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead. “Without them we would not be able to make the advancements we have made in our studies of several different diseases. But it is clear that none of this would be even remotely possible without the power of PS3, it has increased our research capabilities by leaps and bounds.”
On September 23, the more than 670,000 PS3 users participating in Folding@home hit the petaflop mark. Grats, Stanford, Sony and gamers, hit the jump for the press release. More »
As mentioned by Kaz in his TGS keynote, the power of the PS3 has carried the Folding@home project to a milestone never before reached on a distributed computing network – the petraflop…one quadrillion floating point operations per second. It would take everyone in the world doing 75,000 calculations in a second to achieve similar results, so the milestone is pretty massive. “The recent inclusion of PS3 as part of the Folding@home program has afforded our research group with computing power that goes far beyond what we initially hoped,” said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead. “Thanks to PS3, we are now essentially able to fast-forward several aspects of our research by a decade, which will greatly help us make more discoveries and advancements in our studies of several different diseases”.
The PlayStation 3. Blu-ray player. Video game console. Humanitarian. More »
Remember Folding@Home? Well it’s got new bits. Sony have announced the release of a new F@H client, which is loaded with features that I…don’t really understand. Lots of business about proteins being described better, a new rendering engine for molecules, etc. OH! There’s also remote play access, so you can…play (?) it on your PSP? Or just watch it as it plays itself. Folding@home Update [PlayStation.Blog] More »
