To complement the recent news that Sony Playstation 3s are capable of running
distributed computing software (reported here in 'CD Freaks Distributed Computing Team Forum'), the chief of Microsoft's Xbox 360 has made a few encouraging noises that the MS platform might soon join the initiative. Reported in an article on gamesindustry.biz, Peter Moore says "If we truly believe that we
can in some way marshal the resources of a much larger installed base of Xbox 360 owners, with a processor that's of equal power to the PS3, then you have my commitment that we'll look at that."
Distributed computing applications are essentially the use of consumer's computer CPU processor activity to help biomedical research number-crunching projects. Huge calculations are needed to estimate the way that biological proteins fold, and is critical to understanding how diseases are caused by aberrations of the normal protein shape. Whilst super-computers could be employed, another approach is to break the calculations down into much smaller chunks and get the rest of the population's computers or games consoles to help whilst they're not doing anything else in particular.
Despite the positive aspect of his earlier view, Moore's ending statement is more
sanguine. "I'm not quite sure yet whether we're seeing real tangible results from
the PlayStation 3 Folding@home initiative. We continue to look at this and see
whether there's real value,". Sadly it seems that Microsoft Entertainment division
is unable to look further than the end of its own nose when considering the
possible benefits and doing some lateral thinking. I refer you to a report quoting Stanford University's view on the value of the PS3 contribution, and from which readers can draw their own conclusions about how successful the PS3 initiative has been. The phrase "Wake up and smell the coffee, MS", springs to mind.
