Earlier today, the Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization awarded Sony Computer Entertainment the “Good Design Gold Award 2008” for our support of the Folding@home project on PS3.

Folding@home is a distributed computing project which aims to understand protein folding and misfolding, and how they are related to diseases such as Alzheimer’s and many forms of cancer.

We take special pride in the words said by the judges of the event, which gave the Gold award to only 15 projects out of over 3,000 nominees. In their words:

“Analysis of proteins for the purpose of shedding light on diseases is just one example of solution design for social issues, a stance that indicates the direction that design should take in the future. Motivating the people who will be involved in these studies will be the key to success, but the program functions well as an idea for making participation in this project visible on a global scale.”

Many people have worked to get this application working, both in Sony Computer Entertainment and in Stanford University, but all of this would not be doable without the participation and the donation given by you- the active community. So allow me to extend my thanks and hope to see you all continue to contribute to this important project.

Life with PlayStation provides a stunning interactive globe, a 3D world map that you can twirl around to see live cloud movement courtesy of the University of Wisconsin, combined with up-to-date weather information from the Weather Channel, top news headlines provided by Google news, and live web cam images via the Earth Television Network — all localized to the select city. And why not have your favorite soundtrack playing in the background while you go through your morning ritual (just think, no TV commercials and teasers to find out if you need to bring an umbrella to work)? You’re on your own for your morning caffeine fix.

For those following the progress of Hurricane Ike throughout last week, we were able to track the storm’s real-time movement from Life with PlayStation. (See the screenshots below)

We’re also really excited to share that this new lifestyle service is running in parallel with our Folding@home project. Essentially, this means that while you’re taking a stroll on Life with PlayStation, you’re automatically helping Stanford University to work towards curing diseases such as Alzheimer’s and various types of cancers. For those familiar with Folding@home, we’ve made some enhancements for more advanced simulations of protein folding and support for wider variety of simulations, in addition to adding a unique ranking system showcasing top contributors from around the world.

I’ve also put together a quick video demo to make sure you’re checking out all the new features here:

Life with PlayStation is now available for download by selecting the Folding@home icon under “Network” on the XMB. Give it a whirl, we look forward to reading your feedback.

We’re going to offer this as a free service that will be easily accessible directly from the XMB. Life with PlayStation will feed live content to your PS3 with updates on news and weather on a visually stunning and interactive global map. Imagine being able to wake up to your PS3 to see if you need to pack an umbrella for the day. Or just relax as you listen to your favorite tunes while reading up on top news from around the world.

We’re also very excited to share that Life with PlayStation will be combined with our Folding@home project. What does this mean? While you’re tuned into Life with PlayStation, you’ll also be helping Stanford researchers cure diseases like Alzheimer’s and various types of cancer while Folding@home is running in the background.

We know you’re eager to check it out for yourself, so we’re working hard to get it in your hands. Stay tuned.

You can do all that using a simple download and the energy equivalent of keeping a single light bulb. Simply maneuver your Xross Media Bar to the Network category, locate the Folding@home icon and select it. You will be taken through a short download process and after a few minutes (depending on your network connection) you should be up and running.

When you are running the software you can set some options in the Settings menu by hitting the triangle button. Make sure Screensaver is selected to conserve energy and TV life.

Exit the application and go back to the Xross Media Bar. Hit the triangle button when the Folding@home icon is selected. Choose Auto-Start from the right-hand menu and then choose idle time detection. For example, I choose 10 minutes. Now if you are not using the console for 10 straight minutes, Folding@home will run automatically so you don’t have to think about it anymore. You can even turn your TV off and you don’t have to be connected to network all the time. Folding@home will only access your network about 2-3 times a day.

To make sure Folding@home runs automatically, all you have to remember is after playing your favorite holiday game is to quit the game but leave the console powered on. Folding will not happen if you turn the console off.

There is a myriad of information available under Information option. For example, you can read about your current running project by choosing Information and then Current Project.

We’ve also recently updated to version 1.3 of the FAH client, which allows you to stream music from your PS3’s hard disk drive while running the program.

Thank you for listening, hope you can do some relaxing over this holiday season and remember to run Folding in those little bits of time in which you are not playing your favorite game on the PS3…

If you happen to be one of the people that wants to leave their machine running after they finished their late-night gaming session, but wish to shut it down after a limited period of time, we have a great tip for you:

• Go to Settings menu, select Automatic Shutdown and then After Current. You will see a little clock appearing on the top right hand corner of the screen. When this clock reaches zero, the machine will power off completely so you can sleep quietly through the night. In this option the machine will power off after sending the data back to Stanford University so your contribution to the project is maximized.
• You may also choose to shut down after a limited period of time (for example, 3 or 4 hours). To do that choose the Automatic Shutdown option and click on the “In 01h:00m” timer. You will now be able to change the timer settings. After rotating the timer to a new time, you should now see your selected timer appear at the top right corner of the screen. This timer will count all the way down to 0 and then power off the system.
• To disable active timer at any time, go to Settings, choose Automatic Shutdown and then Disable.

What’s a better Holiday addition to Folding than playing music? We’ve added a great feature in this version in the form of a background music player:

• To activate the music player select Music and then a channel. The channels are automatically populated with songs you have stored on your Hard Disk Drive! For holiday music I prefer to choose Dramatic (yeah!) and voila – music is playing.
• If you wish to skip to another track, just use a combination of X + left or right arrow. You can also change the channel by choosing X + up or down arrow. Happy listening!
• To stop music from playing, select Music again from the main menu and choose “disable.”
• Your music playback selection will be saved between consecutive runs of Folding@home.

We hope that these enhancements help improve your FAH experience. The response from PS3 owners really has been spectacular, and thanks to you, the most powerful distributed computer network in the world continues to grow.

I’d like to be the first one to congratulate Folding@home users for being recognized by Guinness World Records as the most powerful distributed computing network in the world! The record was set on September 19, 2007 when F@h surpassed a petaflop.

For those of you who have been following the stats and have read my previous blog posts, which explain all about petaflop computing, this might not come as a big surprise. However, to get this sort of recognition does put things in a perspective.

Professor Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead, said it best:

“To have Folding@home recognized by Guinness World Records as the most powerful distributed computing network ever is a reflection of the extraordinary worldwide participation by gamers and consumers around the world and for that we are very grateful. Without them we would not be able to make the advancements we have made in our studies of several different diseases. But it is clear that none of this would be even remotely possible without the power of PS3, it has increased our research capabilities by leaps and bounds.”

More F@h news: thanks to the guys at Stanford University, the web pages have been updated to a new look, you can check that out by going to any of the information pages under the main menu of the program. For example, Folding news is now updated on a daily basis.

In team wars: DL.TV is fighting to get into the top 20 teams, and surpassed team engadget (which is now at the 24th place). SCEA team is at the respectable place of 126, so as you can see it’s a close race.

Click here for more details on this prestigious milestone.

As can be seen from the stats page over at Stanford, PS3 consoles are delivering 1020 TFLOPS (that’s over 1 Petaflop) from 41,145 participants.

I’d like to encourage people that really want to learn more about what Stanford’s doing with Folding@home to read the project director’s blog. He recently blogged about how processors such as the Cell/B.E. can produce that much work for the Folding@home project.

So, for all you Folders out there… how does it feel to be part of the most powerful distributed computer network in the world? :-)

A petaflop equals one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS). If you’d like to imagine this enormous computation capacity, think about calculating a tip on a restaurant bill, now do that for 75,000 different bills, now do that every second, and lastly, imagine everybody on the planet is doing those calculations at the same second- this is a petaflop calculation. Now you see why I say say enormous…

So how did we get to a petaflop and what caused it to happen now? There are a few factors that together increased the total computational power of the Folding@home network. First, is the increased participation from the Folding community. Just six months after we launched the program, nearly 600,000 PS3 users have registered. Second, we made several improvements to the application (v 1.2) that helped make the computations more accurate and enabled us to squeeze even more work out of each and every PS3 console — we went from 450 teraflops to 800 teraflops. These factors, combined with the contribution from all the other platforms, helped us cross the barrier, which happened sometime over the weekend.

What does this mean to the computer science field? The petaflop by itself is just a number, but in the past was only thought of as something that could be done on a supercomputer or other dedicated hardware which cost millions and millions of dollars. Now we’ve shown that a distributed network featuring a videogame console can reach the same capacity as a supercomputer. On a different level we see a huge contribution to the specific research that Folding@home is conducting, which is understanding the cause of serious diseases. Just think about how long it would take if such a network of computers didn’t exist! According to Stanford, the Folding@home network is helping them conduct research that typically would not have been possible for another 10 years.

What’s next? 2 petaflops? Maybe. Researchers at Stanford are saying that the accuracy can be increased even further to crank even more work out of each PS3. For now, I just feel proud that PS3 owners are making such a great contribution to the network and allowing it to sustain such capacity, it makes all our efforts worthwhile.

Here is a snapshot of statistics as reported from Stanford’s website at the time of this post:

We are all very excited here for the release of the new Folding@home (FAH) client for the PS3! This latest update addresses issues in two major areas: user requests and improving the accuracy of the core that we have running on the SPU. In addition, we totally revised the rendering engine for the molecules and added a more sophisticated display format, which is closer to the imagery you find in biology textbooks. This actually required a protocol change and the protein needs to be described in much more detail from Stanford University’s side of things.

We’re lucky to have a very dedicated group of FAH users and many of you have submitted requests, and ideas, for improving the application. While it’s challenging to address every issue raised, we did try to address your burning ones, especially those that interfere with the science or slow down the performance of the PS3 computation network.

Another really cool feature that was also requested by the FAH community is the support of PSP Remote Play. In this latest version we enabled this feature so you can now access FAH remotely from your PSP (that you already own, since it’s such a cool little gadget) which is an awesome combination since the CELL processor is actually doing the Folding job, but the PSP fully controls the UI so you can carry it around with you.

Of course, we still kept all the familiar and useful features of previous versions, such as the IP lights and Multilanguage support for all PS3 supported languages.

It is heart-warming to watch the community rally behind this project – this passion is in turn encouraging us to continue to look for ways to make it better.

Some people wanted to know what this “folding” is all about and why it makes sense on the PS3. To learn more about the project, you should visit the Stanford Folding@home site and have a look at the PS3 FAQ. But why PS3? First of all, there is no obligation to run the program, you can always ignore it if you prefer. The PS3 has two valuable things to offer researchers at Stanford: its powerful Cell Processor plus a large, dedicated PS3 community that is willing to help. These two things combined result in a significant contribution to the work that is done at Stanford to fight diseases.

There have been a lot of feature proposals. The F@h client on PS3 will be updated from time to time, and I am sure that we are picking up some of the suggestions. Stay tuned for details…

Many folks posted their WU scores – good work everyone! You probably know that there are statistics pages at Stanford where you can lookup your scores. But did you know that there are also other sites that take those scores and come up with a much more in-depth analysis? Take a look at Kakaostats or ExtremeOverclocking, just to name a few. You can figure out when you would reach a certain milestone, which rank your team would have a month from now, or review your contribution history. Some PS3-related highlights are below:

The PS3 dominated team 2CH@PS3 is currently rankd 47th since the PS3 F@h client release, which is simply amazing. But they need to fold a little more, otherwise they will be taken over later this week by the rocket-like DL.TV team (these guys are serious).

Another PS3 power team is PS3Forums.com, already ranked 67th.

Also check out the rise of the Official-ish PS3Fanboy Folding Team (soon to break into the top 200) and IGN-PS3 – also, quickly approaching the top 200 milestone.

And of course, there is PlayStation 3 (SCEA), in two weeks they’ll be closing in on the 200 position rank and they just passed the SCEA PDIT team. I can imagine these guys scrambling in the aisles now to recruit more team members…

Thank you to all the contributors, and look for more Folding@home updates here in the near future.