Sony announced today that the total number of users who donated their PlayStation 3’s power for the Stanford University’s Folding@home project has reached over one million milestone. This equates to roughly 3,000 PS3 users registering for Folding@home per day or 2 new registered users every minute worldwide.

The Folding@home program was made available for PS3s in March 2007, ahead the launch of the gaming console in PAL areas.

The Folding@home is leveraging PS3’s powerful Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) to help study the causes of diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis and many cancers. Folding@home aims to understand protein folding and misfolding, and how these are related to diseases and many forms of cancer. Because the process of folding proteins is so complex, computers are used to perform simulations to study the process. Since these simulations can take up to 30 years for a single computer to complete, Folding@home enables this task to be shared among thousands of computers connected via the network, utilizing distributed computing technology. Once the data is processed, the information is sent back via the Internet to the central computer.

Prior to the inclusion of PS3 the Folding@home project was using the distributed computing power of personal computers from around the world. Now a network of roughly 10,000 PS3s can accomplish the same amount of work as a network of 100,000 PCs, and have the ability to perform research simulations in weeks rather than years. In fact, it took just six months after PS3 joining Folding@home for the project to surpass a petaflops, a computing milestone.

In computing, FLOPS (or flops) is an acronym meaning Floating point Operations Per Second. This is used as a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating point calculations; similar to instructions per second.

"Since partnering with SCEI, we have seen our research capabilities increase by leaps and bounds through the continued participation of Folding@home users," said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead. "Now we have over one million PS3 users registered for Folding@home, allowing us to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally, with the goal of finding cures to some of the world's most life-threatening diseases."