Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. has announced that PLAYSTATION 3 computer entertainment
systems, part of Stanford University’s Folding@home program, have enabled the distributed computing project to be recognized by Guinness World Records as the most powerful distributed computing network in the world.

The record was initially set on September 16, 2007 as Folding@home surpassed one petaflop (one quadrillion floating point operations per second). The PS3 contribution itself reached the petaflop mark on September 23, 2007, according to Sony.

Folding@home currently consists of approximately 200,000 actively processing computers, according to a statement on the Folding@home Petaflop Initiative FAQ by Professor Vijay Pande at Stanford University. “We expect that as this hardware becomes more common, we would easily surpass the 10 Petaflop level.”

In The Singuarity Is Near (p. 124), Ray Kurzweil estimated that the computational capacity of the human brain is 10 petaflops (10¹⁶ calculations per second).

“Our goal is to apply this new technology to push Folding@home into a new level of capabilities, applying our simulations to further study of protein folding and related diseases, including Alzheimer’s Disease, Huntington’s Disease, and certain forms of cancer,” says the Stanford FAQ. “With these computational advances, coupled with new simulation methodologies to harness the new techniques, we will be able to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally, and make even greater impacts on our knowledge of folding and folding related diseases.”

IBM’s BlueGene/L supercomputer, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is currently the world’s fastest general-purpose supercomputer, running at a peak speed of 360 teraflops.