Sony today announced that over one million PlayStation 3 owners worldwide are participating in Stanford University’s Folding@home project, a distributed computing project that uses idle CPU power to research protein folding, in hope to understand human genetics.

SCEI teamed up with Stanford University to launch the PS3 Folding@home project on March 22, coinciding with the release of firmware 1.6. Roughly 3,000 PS3 users register for Folding@home each day, which equates to 2 new registered users every minute worldwide.

Vijay Pande, Folding@home project lead and Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University, had this to say about the groundbreaking success of the project:

Since partnering with SCEI, we have seen our research capabilities increase by leaps and bounds through the continued participation of Folding@home users. Now we have over one million PS3 users registered for Folding@home, allowing us to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally, with the goal of finding cures to some of the world’s most life-threatening diseases. We are grateful for the extraordinary worldwide participation by PS3 and PC users around the globe.

Congrats!

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