Playstation 3 owners can be molecular biologists

Researchers at the Research Unit on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) at the Instituto Municipal de Investigación Médica (IMIM) and the Universidad Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona, have devised a way of capturing the computational power of the cell processor that sits at the heart of Sony’s Playstation 3 to create a distributed supercomputer for systems biology.

The platform, www.ps3grid.net, allows PS3 owners to put their console at the disposal of high-level international science.

In only a few seconds, using a 1 GB data stick, the Linux Live operating system and the PS3Grid software is loaded in the Playstation. The Playstation 3 is then connected to the PS3Grid server, to download the job to be completed. The researchers says the PS3 can carry out calculations on molecular structures as 16 times fast as with a PC.

To return the Playstation 3 to its normal games activity, it just needs to be turned off and restarted again.

The project is coordinated by Gianni De Fabritiis, of the Research Unit on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) at the IMIM–UPF and the Department of Experimental and Health Sciences at the UPF, with the collaboration of Matt Harvey, of Imperial College London, and Jordi Villà and Giovanni Giupponi, at the Computational Biochemical and Biophysics lab at GRIB–IMIM/UPF.

The PS3 grid is being applied to carry out simulations of  biomolecular activity such as enzymatic reactions, the movement of ions through cell membranes and modelling the tertiary structure of proteins.