One Million PS3 Owners Sign Up For Folding@Home Project

Remember that whole Folding@Home project, the one that uses the power of your idle computer to find cures for diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's? Well we told you last spring that Sony had decided to include the option to utilize the power of your PS3 to contribute to the project. It didn't take long for the PS3 to show off its power, and now it has reached a new milestone.

As of yesterday, there are now one million PS3 owners signed up for the project. That's an awesome milestone for the PS3 community. When you consider the fact that the PS3s were providing more power than all of the other systems combined several months ago, you can imagine that they are certainly doing most of the work now.

What's interesting is that this news came from a Sony press release which boasted the 1 million PS3 users working on the project. However, if you head over to the the official Folding@Home blog, they have been discussing some issues with the servers that handle PS3 connections. One quote stood out from the rest. "The PS3 backend has been spec'd out to handle 1M PS3 clients and we are way under that."

Perhaps that simply means that while a million people have signed up, they don't actually see that many PS3s connected. The stats page contributes to that theory, as it only shows the total number of CPUs as 422,964. I believe that they only report the number of PS3s that have actually done work for the project in the last 50 days, which would likely explain the discrepancy in the numbers. Either way, it's still a great milestone for both the gaming and medical communities.