Sony sees opportunity in the idle computing power of 6 million PlayStation 3s. It’s considering offering product discounts and other incentives to entice owners to leave their game consoles on, so Sony can corral them into a supercomputing grid it could lease to businesses. Companies, particularly in the medical industry, have approached Sony with the idea after reading about PlayStation 3 owners’ participation in Folding@home, a Stanford University project that uses home computers to form a grid to study diseases.
PS3s pack much more processing power than the average PC–30 times more, claims Sony, thanks to their IBM Cell processor. One day last week, 20,000 PS3s were on the Folding@home project.
Source: InformationWeek