PS3 Folding@Home Reaches Petaflop

- Press release by Sony

Thursday, September 20, 2007 - 21:19:59 EST

Sony today announced that PLAYSTATION 3 systems, part of Stanford University's Folding@home program, have enabled the distributed computing project to reach a petaflop, a milestone never before reached on a distributed computing network. Known amongst the scientific community, a petaflop is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS). In other words, if every person on the planet were to perform a simple mathematical calculation, such as calculating a percentage, each person would have to perform 75,000 calculations every second for the world's population to achieve a petaflop.