Tokyo - Sony Computer Entertainment announced on Thursday that Folding@home, its distributed computing project that uses the processing power of a network of PlayStation 3 consoles to crunch data for Stanford University research, has reached the "petaflop" milestone.

Folding@home is now the first distributed computing project on record to have reached a petaflop -- or, the ability of a computer to do a quadrillion floating point operations per second.

The project is being used to further Stanford research into cures for diseases including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and cancer.

"Thanks to PS3, we are now essentially able to fast-forward several aspects of our research by a decade, which will greatly help us make more discoveries and advancements in our studies of several different diseases," said Vijay Pande, associate professor of chemistry at Stanford and Folding@home project lead.

Related Links:
http://tinyurl.com/2epvnv

http://folding.stanford.edu

http://www.scei.co.jp/folding/en