Officials from Sony Computer Entertainment have announced new details of the [email protected] distributed computing project on PlayStation 3, which is used to aid in calculations relating to the study of protein folding and protein folding diseases.
The collaboration with Sony was first announced by Leland Stanford Junior University in the U.S., in August of last year. The project is already being run by joining thousands of PCs throughout the world, with a concept similar to the popular [email protected] screen saver, which analyzes radio-telescope data to find evidence of intelligent signals from space.
The [email protected] project involves simulations to help study protein folding and related diseases, including Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's Disease, Huntington's Disease, cystic fibrosis and certain forms of cancer. Once the data is processed by PCs and PlayStation 3s running the software the information is sent back via the Internet to the project's central computer.