Beginning next month, the Life With Playstation extension of Stanford University’s Folding@Home program will be shutting down. Beginning with system update 4.30, set to launch this Thursday, the program will no longer be accepting any new applicants. Originally launched in 2007, the program was designed to allow applicants to involve their systems in a study to understand protein folding in an attempt to cure such diseases as cancer and Parkinson’s.
Users in the program left their units on but inactive, the combined processing abilities aiding in the University’s distributed computing program. Over its lifetime, 15 million users dedicated their systems to the program, adding up to 100 million computation hours.
“The PS3 system was a game changer for Folding@Home, as it opened the door for new methods and new processors, eventually also leading to the use of GPUs,” said Vijay Pande, Folding@Home Research Lead at Stanford University, “We have had numerous successes in recent years. Specifically, in a paper just published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, we report on tests of predictions from earlier Folding@Home simulations, and how these predictions have led to a new strategy to fight Alzheimer’s disease.”
The end of this program means that the research has gone internal, and will now be worked on by Stanford researchers alone in an attempt to push these successes as a viable cure. No word on how successful the research was, but they are saying that they are “very excited that the directions set out in this paper do appear to be bearing fruit in terms of a viable drug (not just a drug candidate).”
(via Playstation Blog)
Report filed by Rakan Stanbouly