we're talking actuall results. how many OC'ed radeons are running the folding program? the PS3 has actually helped Stanford with its research by a great deal

why are so many people trying to make this news negative? is it because its on the ps3? This is clearly a good thing so why cant people accept it and give a well done to all the work.

This is really sad if you make this negative :(.

because I bet that this research will end in nothing.

not because I don't want a cure...

but because this is only a big spot.

and ok.

but when they make a spot on sorrow of people dying right now...

what means a "decade"????????

did they consider new cpus coming next year????

can they prove this "decade"??????

which numbers they showed to prove this petaflop????? 

READ THIS: 

June 25, 2007

IBM has devised a new Blue Gene supercomputer--the Blue Gene/P--that will be capable of processing more than 3 quadrillion operations a second, or 3 petaflops, a possible record. Blue Gene/P is designed to continuously operate at more than 1 petaflop in real-world situations.

Blue Gene/P marks a significant milestone in computing. Last November, the Blue Gene/L was ranked as the most powerful computer on the planet: it topped out at 280 teraflops, or 280 trillion operations a second during continuous operation.

Put another way, a Blue Gene/P operating at a petaflop is performing more operations than a 1.5-mile-high stack of laptops.

On June 19 (2006.06.19), Japan’s Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (Riken), SGI Japan and Intel announced the development of a supercomputer with a theoretical peak performance of 1 petaflops (one million billion floating point operations per second). Known as the MDGRAPE-3 (or the Protein Explorer), the computer system is designed to perform molecular dynamics simulations of such phenomena as non-bonding interactions between atoms.

The system consists of 201 units equipped with 24 of RIKEN’s MDGRAPE-3 LSI chips for molecular dynamics simulation (total of 4,808 chips), which are connected to 64 parallel servers equipped with 256 of Intel’s Xeon 5000-series cores and 37 parallel servers equipped with 74 Xeon 3.2 GHz cores.

In the future, RIKEN plans to further upgrade the system with Xeon 5100-series processors (codenamed Woodcrest), and testing is now underway.

The LINPACK Benchmark, which is the standard for the Top 500 List, could not be performed on the system, so the performance cannot be compared directly with the world’s other top supercomputers. However, the system’s theoretical peak performance of 1 petaflops will set the computer firmly at the top of the list, with a speed about three times that of IBM’s BlueGene/L at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (currently No.1 on the list). 

4,189 Radeon (all series) with a total of 42 TFLOPS

245,854  Playstation 3s with 741 TFLOPS

They should really do a client for nVidia GPUs, as there are a lot more of them :/ 

Wow! That's pretty darn impressive

Wow! That's pretty darn impressive

Edit - Double posted for some reason! My apologies - wish I could delete! 

would be nice if all ps3 owners used this.
i run it on my computer, but it's pretty slow...

 Dude, you don't have to be such an ass. This really isn't about "OMGodz teh cell!", it's about progress being made. Can we cut out the console wars for a minute

Being a 3rd year chemistry major wanting to go into pharmacology, I can really appreciate this progress. It's just too bad that some people really can't.

It was never really about curing cancer or finding a cure to alzheimer's. Protein folding is one of the biggest mysteries to biologists/chemists everywhere. There are so many forces here and there it's nearly impossible for  a handful of researchers to ever do these calculations even if they had 10 generations to do it.

How come some of you can't appreciate this? 

And what the hell is a "big spot"? 

What is folding@home? i've heard of it but ya know, i dunno what it is.