Excerpt from this article: http://videogames.yahoo.com/ongoingfeature?eid=514753&page=0
Stanford University's Folding@home project focuses on protein folding, a chemical process that may hold the keys to unlocking the mysteries of diseases like Alzheimer's, Cystic Fibrosis, Hodgkin's and various other cancers. The team has created a program that simulates the nearly infinite number of ways proteins can fold, a system that requires a massive amount of computational power.
Instead of taxing resources by building a battalion of supercomputers to crunch the data, the Folding@home team decided to tap into the vast quantity of lonely home computers in the wild. And it worked -- since the program's inception in October of 2000, hundreds of thousands of ordinary folks have lent their computers' unused processing power to the project, effectively creating one of the largest distributed computing networks in the world.
But once kindhearted PS3 owners got involved, the numbers went from solid to staggering.
Folding@home was tucked into a recent PS3 firmware update as a small icon found in the Network section of the console's front end, allowing users to willingly join the program in a few quick clicks. It has since blossomed, with over 250,000 registered PS3 owners donating enormous amounts of spare power in the name of philanthropic science.
Wow, that's pretty amazing! I wonder if you can then write off you Internet connection fees on your taxes as Charity : )
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