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Folding@home Sets Record

Folding@home Sets Record

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Stanford University ‘s Folding@home project, which is partially powered by a network of PlayStation 3s, has broken a Guinness World Record.  The project now holds the title of the most powerful distributed computer network in the world.

According to the press release, “The record was initially set on September 16, 2007 as Folding@home surpassed one petaflop, a computing milestone that has never been reached before by a distributed computing network. In addition to this, the collective efforts of our users have enabled PS3 alone to reach the petaflop mark on September 23, 2007.”

The release continues to state that “the record is a testament to the widespread participation of PS3 users from around the world-currently more than 670,000 unique PS3 users have registered to the Folding@home network, bringing the overall computing power of the program to more than a petaflop.”

The Folding@home project is a network of computers that run “computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics” with the intention of finding treatments for diseases such as Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer, and other similar diseases.

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