PetaFLOP is such a great word. It perfectly straddles (as few other technical terms can) the borderline between scientifically impressive and downright silly simultaneously. Strictly defined as a quadrillion Floating Point Objects per Second, a petaFLOP is also an amount of processing power roughly equal to every man, woman and child on earth each possessing the ability to perform 75,000 basic math equations in their heads at the same time -- in other words, a whole lot of computing power. For Stanford's ambitious Folding@Home Project, the milestone of one full petaFLOP of throughput has long stood as a crazy-optimistic goal... The kind of benchmark that disease research scientists go to bed dreaming about. Well, as of today Stanford is pleased to finally announce that the power of over 600,000 registered PS3 Cell processors has at last managed to kick Folding@Home through the 1 petaFLOP goalpoasts. And there was much rejoicing.
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The recent inclusion of PS3 as part of the Folding@home program has afforded our research group with computing power that goes far beyond what we initially hoped" commented Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead. "
Thanks to PS3, we are now essentially able to fast-forward several aspects of our research by a decade, which will greatly help us make more discoveries and advancements in our studies of several different diseases."
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