Could your PlayStation 3 help find a cure for cancer?

by Joanne Pontee, Marketing Manger, PDMS

I recently visited a friend who was bemoaning the fact that her teenage son was becoming a virtual hermit, spending most of his waking hours and several hours when he should have been sleeping, playing Grand Theft Auto on his PlayStation 3. Her son, who had managed to tear himself away from the game for some liquid refreshment, heard her complaining and retorted to us that he wasn’t just using his console to take part in a murky criminal underworld of bank robberies and car chases, but he was also using it to help find a cure for cancer and Alzheimer’s! After initially treating his response with some scepticism, I discovered that he was in fact telling the truth. Before he disappeared back into his room, he explained that he’d signed up to a project that used the spare processing power of PS3’s around the world to help understand the cause of diseases. Intrigued, I decided to find out more.

It turns out that my friend’s game obsessed son isn’t, as I originally thought, participating in some kind of school project for geeky teenagers, but in fact a global project that has recently entered the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s most powerful ‘distributed computing network’. Distributed computing is a method for solving large complex problems by dividing them between many computers. They harness the idle processing power of computers to crunch small packets of data, which are then fed back over the internet to a central computer.

This particular project, run by Stanford University and named “Folding@home” http://folding.stanford.edu, uses distributed computing (sometimes also referred to as volunteer computing) to examine protein folding and misfolding to try to understand how these are related to diseases and forms of cancer. When proteins do not fold correctly, there can be serious consequences including many well know diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Huntingdon’s, Parkinson’s disease and many cancers. The total number of users who have signed up since its launch in March 2007 recently topped one million. This equates to roughly 3,000 PS3 users registering for ‘Folding@home’ per day or 2 new registered users every minute worldwide.

The Folding@home project was originally set up to leverage the distributed computing power of personal computers around the world but its research capabilities have been given a huge boost by the inclusion of the PS3. A network of approximately 10,000 PS3s can accomplish the same amount of work as a network of 100,000 PC’s, providing the ability to perform research simulations in weeks rather than years. This is all down to the PS3’s powerful processor, known as the “cell” which runs up to 10 times faster than current PC chips. I read that, after the PS3 joined Folding@home, it took just 6 months for the project to surpass a ‘petaflop’ - one of the best sounding computer terms I’ve come across recently! Apparently, a ‘petaflop’ is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations (FLOPS) or calculations per second. To put this in context, BlueGene L, presently the world’s most powerful supercomputer, has a top speed of a mere 280.6 trillion FLOPS (3,500 times less powerful).

Whilst investigating the Folding@home project, I was staggered by the sheer volume and diversity of volunteer or distributed computing projects that are in existence. To participate you generally need to download software from the project website and, when it would otherwise be doing nothing, your PC is engaged, usually by the screensaver or some other “sleep mode”, to work on computational problems. Simply by switching on your PC or plugging in your console your can help model the future climate of the planet, search for new prime numbers, help design drugs against AIDS and even help look for ET!

One of the first high profile volunteer computing projects is SETI@home, launched back in 1999. It uses spare processing capacity on over 3 million ordinary PCs to sift through radio-telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. They haven’t heard from the elusive little green men yet but, fans of the X Files take note, whilst you are sleeping it could be your computer that receives the call! The director of SETI, David Anderson, was responsible for the launch of an open-source platform for running distributed projects called BOINC (Berkley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) in 2002. BOINC (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/) has been partly responsible for the proliferation of projects in recent years and today over 40 BOINC projects are in operation.

The use of game consoles, the PS3 in particular, for distributed computing is also gaining further momentum partly due to commercial reasons. Many believe that currently the processors in the PS3 are the only affordable cell processors available at a reasonable cost. The US Military have purchased 300 consoles for research and together with the University of Massachusetts, the US Airforce are also using a cluster of 16 PS3s to research the possible effects on space and time after 2 black holes merge.

Owners of iPhones or Nintendo Wii’s will soon be able to put their devices to good use too, by taking part in a new volunteer project to help predict an earthquake. The Quake Catcher Network not only uses spare processing power, but also accelerometers that are already installed in laptops and other devices such as the Wii to help look for any seismic activity. Accelerometers protect laptops from mechanical failure caused by sudden impacts and measure vibrations. Elizabeth Cochran of the University of California at Riverside eventually hopes that the thousands of users who participate will act like a grid of detectors that can sense an earthquake before it does too much damage and initiate some kind of early warning system to people in large cities, giving them valuable seconds to take shelter. As soon as testing is completed later this summer volunteers will be able to sign up via BOINC.

So, if you are feeling philanthropic and don’t mind a slightly higher than usual electricity bill, are there any risks involved in participating in distributed computing projects that you should know about? Well in theory, hackers could attack projects and viruses could be distributed via these projects, but in practice they currently seem to be relatively risk free. In the 7 years that the SETI@home project has been running there haven’t been any known instances of harm done to a user’s computer. Volunteer computing appears to be a relatively easy way to help contribute to global research projects and many volunteers also enjoy the community aspect of participation. Most projects have a social networking element and projects such as SETI give volunteers “credits” for donating computing time; individuals and teams then compete to donate the most hours.

Scientific research is taking the distributed network concept one step further, and the success of volunteer computing has lead to the creation of “volunteer thinking”. In addition to donating your PC or console’s processing power you can donate your own brain power too. These projects involve people in the analysis of scientific data online; you can catalogue galaxies, scour microscope images and map out remote regions. Current projects include AfricaMap which seeks to create more accurate cartographic maps of Africa by asking volunteers to look at satellite images over the African continent and search for roads, bridges, rivers etc. Another project, Galaxy Zoo uses armchair astronomers to help scientists classify galaxies by looking at images to identify whether it’s a spiral or an elliptical galaxy.

The growth in volunteer computing projects is predicted to continue with more and more people around the world joining in, for that feel good factor of making a positive contribution to scientific and medical research, that one day may produce some ground breaking results. I’m not sure my friend’s son is donating the processing power of his PS3 for entirely altruistic reasons but it does provides provide an excellent rebuttal to his mother’s misgivings about the excessive use of his PS3, and if he can contribute to scientific research for the good of mankind when he isn’t pretending to be a criminal low life then all the better!