Kotaku had an interesting story yesterday about an academic who created a supercomputer cluster costing a measly $5,000, using eight PS3s. Apparently the PS3 is very good at clustering because of the very powerful Cell processor.
Although my PC definitely doesn’t have as much power as a supercomputer I really feel that I should use my idle cycles to do some folding, so if you are part of a team let me know and I’ll add my PC to your cluster.
If you haven’t come across Folding@Home yet, it is a distributed computing project where people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world.
All of this processing power is used to investigate and study protein folding, which help to find treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.
Definitely a worthy use of your PC and much better than just running a screen-saver!
