PlayStation 3 Will Fight Alzheimer's.
Bruce Borden is debating whether to buy a Sony PlayStation 3 even though he has no interest in playing games. For him, it's about helping Stanford University conduct Alzheimer's research after his mother died of the disease.
Already, he has five computers continuously crunching numbers in his Orange County home in Tustin as part of a "supercomputer" collection of 200,000 PCs that span the globe from Africa to Australia.
By month's end, it will be possible for people to add their PlayStation 3s to that Internet force and further the scientific research at Stanford into Alzheimer's and perhaps, later, other diseases that occur when proteins don't fold correctly, such as mad cow, Huntington's, Parkinson's and many cancers.
The project is the creation of Stanford Associate Professor Vijay Pande, who has dubbed it "Folding@home." Stanford and Sony will announce the latest twist involving PlayStation 3 at a campus news conference today.
"In addition to playing games, you can do some good for the world," Borden said of PlayStation 3 owners. "I decided Folding@home is something I could do to help."
Folding@home, started in 2000, is what's known as a distributive computing project that could soon double in size if enough PlayStation 3 gamers download the software that Sony will soon make available and then leave their consoles on when they're not playing. The PlayStation 3's Cell processor will allow Stanford researchers to do certain calculations twenty times as fast as a personal computer. So if just 10,000 people with the gaming equipment help out, it will be the equivalent of the 200,000 PCs already working for Stanford.
"It doubles Folding@home in one swoop," said Pande.
Proteins are the building blocks of biology and assemble themselves in a process called "folding." Pande's research group is studying computer simulations of what happens when proteins don't fold correctly. Misfolding can happen in two ways. Sometimes proteins "aggregate" in the same way that cars on a highway begin crashing into each other. Or they turn them into something bad -- instead of an auto factory making a car, out comes a chainsaw.
By learning how proteins misfold, scientists hope to better understand how to prevent that. Already Pande has what he considers some exciting results from his Alzheimer's research, although he can't discuss them while they are undergoing peer review. And he has done some preliminary work on Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases with plans for more research in the future.
The whole point of a distributive computing project is to speed up calculations that otherwise would take a long time. A typical calculation in this field can take 10 million days on the fastest home computer, in part because researchers are trying to make such detailed models of how atoms interact when proteins fold. But breaking up the calculation and giving pieces to 100,000 personal computers or 5,000 PlayStations means it can be completed in 100 days.
Participants can still use their personal computers for e-mail and other daily activities while they're "folding at home," but the PlayStation 3 will only fold when play has stopped. Borden, who studied mathematics, understands why distributive computing makes so much sense for what Pande is trying to do. Borden participated in one of the first distributive computing projects that popularized the idea -- the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project at UC Berkeley, which uses radio telescopes to listen for signals from space. The data is then distributed to personal computers around the world and analyzed to see if it indicates the existence of extraterrestrial technology. After he stopped using his computers for SETI, Borden stumbled on Folding@home.
Borden's mother died in 1994 of Alzheimer's and he understood the importance of Pande's basic research. He is thrilled by all the published papers on the Folding@home Web site generated by the makeshift supercomputer he's part of. If he decides to buy a PlayStation 3, he'll likely give it to his grandchildren and hope his daughter agrees to pay the electric bill, he said.
He'll tell her, "Please turn it on and leave it on."
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Already, he has five computers continuously crunching numbers in his Orange County home in Tustin as part of a "supercomputer" collection of 200,000 PCs that span the globe from Africa to Australia.
By month's end, it will be possible for people to add their PlayStation 3s to that Internet force and further the scientific research at Stanford into Alzheimer's and perhaps, later, other diseases that occur when proteins don't fold correctly, such as mad cow, Huntington's, Parkinson's and many cancers.
The project is the creation of Stanford Associate Professor Vijay Pande, who has dubbed it "Folding@home." Stanford and Sony will announce the latest twist involving PlayStation 3 at a campus news conference today.
"In addition to playing games, you can do some good for the world," Borden said of PlayStation 3 owners. "I decided Folding@home is something I could do to help."
Folding@home, started in 2000, is what's known as a distributive computing project that could soon double in size if enough PlayStation 3 gamers download the software that Sony will soon make available and then leave their consoles on when they're not playing. The PlayStation 3's Cell processor will allow Stanford researchers to do certain calculations twenty times as fast as a personal computer. So if just 10,000 people with the gaming equipment help out, it will be the equivalent of the 200,000 PCs already working for Stanford.
"It doubles Folding@home in one swoop," said Pande.
Proteins are the building blocks of biology and assemble themselves in a process called "folding." Pande's research group is studying computer simulations of what happens when proteins don't fold correctly. Misfolding can happen in two ways. Sometimes proteins "aggregate" in the same way that cars on a highway begin crashing into each other. Or they turn them into something bad -- instead of an auto factory making a car, out comes a chainsaw.
By learning how proteins misfold, scientists hope to better understand how to prevent that. Already Pande has what he considers some exciting results from his Alzheimer's research, although he can't discuss them while they are undergoing peer review. And he has done some preliminary work on Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases with plans for more research in the future.
The whole point of a distributive computing project is to speed up calculations that otherwise would take a long time. A typical calculation in this field can take 10 million days on the fastest home computer, in part because researchers are trying to make such detailed models of how atoms interact when proteins fold. But breaking up the calculation and giving pieces to 100,000 personal computers or 5,000 PlayStations means it can be completed in 100 days.
Participants can still use their personal computers for e-mail and other daily activities while they're "folding at home," but the PlayStation 3 will only fold when play has stopped. Borden, who studied mathematics, understands why distributive computing makes so much sense for what Pande is trying to do. Borden participated in one of the first distributive computing projects that popularized the idea -- the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project at UC Berkeley, which uses radio telescopes to listen for signals from space. The data is then distributed to personal computers around the world and analyzed to see if it indicates the existence of extraterrestrial technology. After he stopped using his computers for SETI, Borden stumbled on Folding@home.
Borden's mother died in 1994 of Alzheimer's and he understood the importance of Pande's basic research. He is thrilled by all the published papers on the Folding@home Web site generated by the makeshift supercomputer he's part of. If he decides to buy a PlayStation 3, he'll likely give it to his grandchildren and hope his daughter agrees to pay the electric bill, he said.
He'll tell her, "Please turn it on and leave it on."
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posted by UncommonBusiness at 2:52 AM
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