I ran F@H for a few days with my new PS3 (bought it due to the recent price drop to $499).
Anyway, I noticed PS3GRID, a BOINC project. "PS3GRID is a volunteer computing project based on the PlayStation3 and BOINC for full-atom molecular dynamics simulations and other scientific applications specially optimized for the Cell processor." and "Molecular dynamics (MD) is a simulation methodology which enables, for instance, the study of the dynamics of proteins in their environment. It is used in academia and by pharma companies for a wide variety of applications, including drug design, drug screening and in general to investigate protein function."
It required you add Linux to the PS3, and then run BOINC on it. I gave it a shot (the directions are pretty straight-forward). Their tasks run
22 hours, and generate about
3400 points each. That's about the
same as a quad-G5! Impressive! And it's not just a case of credit inflation. They benchmarked the application on an Opteron 146, and the PS3 does it
16x faster. So they made the credit per result 16x what the Opteron machine did.
Technology
Also, there are applications for SETI@home (alpha) and SIMAP available for the PS3. So you aren't limited to just the one project, if there is any down-time.
If you are looking for something new and/or massive points, give it a shot!
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