PS3 helps Folding@Home reach a PetaFLOP

Now how will so-inclined parents claim video games consoles don't contribute anything constructive?

In an achievement that is heavily weighted towards the addition of a PS3 client to the project, Folding@Home has busted through the Petaflop mark, producing a distributed supercomputer capable of above and beyond a thousand trillion flops. Currently the client stats show 1.194 Petaflops of activity, 0.93 of which is due to the PlayStation 3's contribution.

[Via Engadget].

I'd been amazed by the PS3's use in Folding@Home before, but hadn't fully realized the impact of the cell processors. It's interesting that the PS3 clients can't be used for all the computations needed by the project, but they are useful for the most common computations, and are blazingly fast at them, so the combined supercomputer formed by PS3s and the other platforms is a truly amazing example of massive parallelism in system where each compute node is not created equal.