PS3 Folding@Home Project is Honored in Japan

YES YES YES. Please do!

http://folding.stanford.edu/

even the cores of your computer that you DO normally use can be devoted to the program, they'l only take the cycles you dont use for another program. Think about the few seconds it took to read this line. your comptuer did nothing. Millions of calculations per second....wasted.

Seti@home and Folding@home are both examples of distributed networking projects. Both have overwhelming amounts of data to crunch, so much that the largest super-computer would still take an unreasonable amount of time to finish it.

Distributed projects take that data, divide it into managable chunks, and distribute it amongts members. Some projects involve hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide. For many many years i helped distributed.net work on "optimal golumn rulers", which were math challenges who'se results could help align satelite arrays. the data generated by Folding@home is used to analyze protein makups (protiens are the basic buildingblock of all life). seti@home analyzes chunks of radio-data collected from space. It analyzes it looking for patterns. Something a single computer could never do (there's just toooo much data)

what's amazing is that distributed computing projects run in the background on your computer. Unless your doing something pretty major on your computer, it's doubtfull your using more than 1% of the available processing power. For example, while i write this i have IE, my virus scanners, an MP3 Player, and utorrent seeding 31 different files. I'm still not using more than a few percent of my processor.

Imagine that, now across about 300 million computers worldwide. That's a LOT of wasted computer cycles. If we could harness all of that wasted processing time for a single task.....? well lets just say you should have one running. Wether you look for ET, or help cure cancer, it costs you nothing.

And when flip on a game, try to render a video, or start doing anything that uses just a little bit more processing power? seti, folding, d.net, or whichever program you have running, it just goes dormant until your done. Your programs are ALWAYS held at a higher priority than it.

Hope that explains it :)