While not a game, here is something really cool that you can and should do with your PS3 when not gaming.

If you are already familiar with SETI at Home (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) for Macs and peecees you are in familiar territory. The good folks at Sony and Stanford have created a distributed computing program that you can use. Proteins are the engines that help us maintain our lives. Proteins must fold to do work. This is a good thing. When they "misfold" major issues can arise including disease. Stanford believes that in understanding how proteins misfold they can find ways to prevent and treat diseases.

Distributed computing is a process by which a large problem or question is broken into smaller parts or work units. Each work unit is shared across machines and when each machine completes its work unit, the results are uploaded and compiled, thus solving the larger problem. It allows Stanford to achieve performance beyond a supercomputer without having to spend a lot of doff. The PS3 is so very powerful and uses cell processors. Each PS3 can achieve performance in the 20 Gigaflop scale. A Gigaflop is one BILLION FLOating Point operations (FLOP) per second. Just 50,000 PS3s will achieve PETAflop performance (a THOUSAND TRILLION Flops per second. Easy to see why they wanted to get this out to PS3 users.

To put it into perspective, one petaflop is more than twice as fast as IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer. This is the fastest computer in the world as of November 2007. In that same month, Folding achieved 1.5 petaflops in performance. No doubt, the PS3 contributed to that number. The PS3 is the most widely used processor in the folding network at present. The results so far have been amazing. Stanford started this program back in October of 2000. They added the PS3 shortly after its US launch in March of 2007. According to Guinness, it is now the most powerful distributed computing network in the world. Stanford makes all of the results public so that research scientists the world over can harness the power of this program. You can track the number of folds you have completed and even join teams.

Between my Macs and PS3 I have folded 834 proteins. Each one takes about 8 hours on the PS3 and a bit longer on the Macs. All you have to do is download it from the XMB and when you are done gaming, go back to teh XMB and click on it. The PS3 does all the work. All you donate is the electricity. If you want to help get your karma right, this is a worthwhile enterprise. Any other folders out there? Should we start a CHECKOUTBLOG team?