A project that harnesses the spare processing power of Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) to help understand the cause of diseases has entered the record books. Guinness World Records has recognised folding@home (FAH) as the world's most powerful distributed computing network. More than 700,000 PS3 owners have enrolled their consoles in the Folding@Home project to examine how the shape of proteins affect diseases such as Alzheimer and BSE. The addition of all the PS3 Cell processors has taken the computing power of the network to more than one petaflop. By comparison BlueGene L, which tops the list of most powerful supercomputers, has a top speed of just 280.6 teraflops.

It is clear that none of this would be even remotely possible without the power of PS3, it has increased our research capabilities by leaps and bounds

said Professor Vijay Pande of Stanford University and a leader of the FAH project.