When not engaged in Grand Theft Auto, Kill Zone, and NBA Street Homecourt, PlayStation 3 owners can now put their gaming consoles to work helping to cure disease, fight global warming, and detect extraterrestrial objects.
PS3 users will soon have the option (through a software update) to click on an icon for Stanford University’s Folding@home project. This software will run “protein folding” simulations, helping researchers to understand why proteins sometimes fold incorrectly and mutate into diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
(The PS3 Folding@home client displaying a 3D protein simulation.)
A growing number of universities, research centers, and labs have initiated volunteer-based distributed computing projects in an effort to supercharge their computer processing capabilities. To participate, PC owners generally need to download software from the project website. The participant’s computer is engaged (usually by the screensaver or some other “sleep” mode) to work on computational problems when it would otherwise be doing nothing. Some projects even give participants regular research progress updates and reports on scientific breakthroughs.
From health problems in Africa to gravitational waves, quantum chemistry to climate forecasting, the number of distributed computing projects is rapidly growing, and the added computing power by volunteers can make a significant difference.
Some popular projects include:
Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), now with over 940,000 participants and over 1,700,000 computers, is working on a wide variety of researchtopics.
Oxford University’s Screensaver Lifesaver, is attempting to map a large database of molecular structures against 12 cancer targets.
University of Washington’s Rosetta@home, is focused on developing computational methods that accurately predict and design protein structure for curing a variety of diseases.
Interested PS3 and PC users can find an updated list of active and volunteer distributed computing research projects on Wikipedia.
While different in goals and the nature of the project, this post reminded me of a mature project at the Concord Consortium called the Molecular Workbench (http://workbench.concord.org) program. Similar to the proteins in Michael’s screen shot, teachers can create molecular-level tours and interactive simulations with ease. Molecular Workbench takes a project as fascinating as the one mentioned in this post and places it squarely in the k-12 classroom.