Sony sees opportunity in the idle computing power of the millions PlayStation 3.
Companies, particularly in the medical industry, have approached Sony with the idea after reading about PlayStation 3 owner’s participation in Folding@home, a Stanford University project that uses home computers to form a grid to study diseases.

PS3s have a lot more processing power than the average PC -30 times more, says Sony. This power is given by their IBM Cell processor. One day last week, 20,000 PS3s were on the Folding@home project delivering a combined processing speed of 267 teraflops.

By comparison, the 200,000 PCs online were producing a combined speed of 240 teraflops. A teraflop is a trillion mathematically computations, called floating-point operations, per second.

"PS3s run on the revolutionary Cell processor – co-designed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba – and they can be linked with tens of thousands of other idle PS3s via the internet to run a single analytical programme".
Sony would have to pay customers to keep their machines running all the time since this wouldn't be a nonprofit program like Stanford's.  "It's something we could absolutely do in terms of the technology". "It's whether the consumer can be incentivized to let someone else utilize the computer power of their PS3."

As incentives, Sony is considering discounts on products, such as the PS3 and accessories.

written by Cristian L.