PlayStation 3 Can Help Cure Cancer

By: Tyler Lamb -- Royal Purple

Posted: 9/21/09

Remember the times your mom or significant other assured you that, "Nothing good," would ever come from a video game?

Well gamers of the world here is your chance to disprove the naysayer and better humanity at the same time, with your PlayStation 3, and an application called Folding@Home.

The Folding@Home project began in late 2000 as a distributed computing project based out of Stanford University. The program is used by scientists and researchers to run complex medical simulations, in an attempt to discover how and why proteins fold or more importantly misfolding.

Folding@Home uses PS3's broadband capabilities to help study the causes of cancer and assorted diseases, such as Mad Cow, Huntington's, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and cystic fibrosis.

"Folding" is a term used by doctors and scientists to describe the process proteins undergo when they interact with other proteins and the human body. Many diseases, such as cancer, are caused in part by proteins misfolding.

The process of how and why proteins fold is relatively unknown and intricate, Folding@Home enables the study of questions the scientific community has surrounding folding via sharing information with numerous computers, connected to the Internet, by way of the PS3.

Once the data is processed the information is sent back to Stanford's central computer system. Comprising a huge network, folding at home is considered the world's most powerful supercomputer.

So you're probably asking, "Has folding at home ever helped solve anything?" According to Stanford's Web site, "In 2000-2001, we have folded several small, fast folding proteins, with experimental validation of our method. We are now working to further develop our method, and to apply it to more complex and interesting proteins and protein folding and misfolding questions.

Similarly, scientists have used Xbox 360 consoles to conduct "parallel processing." This is a process very similar to folding. It uses a number of processors running in tandem to rapidly crunch data. University of Warwick professors have been using an Xbox 360 Graphical Processing Unit and are able to perform parallel processing functions at a fraction of the cost of traditional systems.

If you're interested in being a part of Folding@Home, you can join this endeavor today. All that is required is a version 1.6 or later of PS3. In the PS3 menu you will see a "Folding@Home" icon in the network column. Click on the icon and your part of this global effort to better the world is achieved, and maybe in the process save a friend or loved one.

A Folding@Home gamer can connect to the home server and retrieve collected data or "work units," used by scientists to perform calculations regarding protein misfolding.

Gamers can use specific names to keep track of their contributions. They can also contribute under an assigned team name; users may also join together to form one or more teams.

Contributors are allocated a score that indicates the number of completed work units that are posted on the Folding@Home Web site.

Avid gamers can now make scientific strides while playing their favorite video games.