Petaflops and the PS3

What is a petaflop? At first glance I thought this was an unfavorable review of the latest PETA campaign, however a petaflop is the capability of a computer to do a quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS). That's the equivalent of every person on earth doing 75,000 simple math problems per second. Anybody remember "Chisanbop" ?

The reason this is important is because it is the milestone reached by Stanford's "Folding@home" project. Folding@home was designed to simulate protein folding and perform molecular dynamics simulations. The data gathered here would be used to understand the progression of diseases such as Alzheimer's, mad cow, cancer, and even Cystic Fibrosis.

Aside from the OSX, Linux and WIndows folding applications available, there are over 600,000 Playstation 3 users registered who participate in the folding@home project as well. If you feel so inclined you can download the program here and let your computer (or PS3) fight disease when you are not fighting space aliens.