Palo Alto, Calif. - More than 42,000 PlayStation 3 owners have signed up so far for Folding@Home, a distributed computing project from Stanford University that will use the consoles' Cell processors to crunch research data on diseases like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and cancer.

The ability to join the project was activated by Sony through a PlayStation 3 software update last week. The application runs in the background while the PlayStation 3 is idle.

When PS3 owners are added to the Windows, Mac, Linux and other machines running Folding@Home, statistics show Stanford now has nearly 2 million machines employed in its research project.

Related Links:
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home