When not combating virtual alien invasions, gamers can use new software to donate idle time on their Playstation 3 consoles to a computing network searching for the causes of cancer and other diseases.

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SAN FRANCISCO: PlayStation 3 video game consoles will soon be able to link up with a supercomputing network researching the causes of ailments including cancer and Alzheimer's disease.

The Japanese electronics titan Sony said a software update to be made available before the end of March will enable users to devote their consoles' idle time to a Stanford University, California, quest for the cause of diseases caused by 'misfolded' proteins.

Such diseases include Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Huntington's and some forms of cancer, according to Stanford associate professor Vijay Pande, leader of the 'Folding@home' project.

The software will let users click on a Folding@home icon on their television screens to have their machines devote their computing power to medical research whenever games aren't being played.

According to the Folding@home website, because protein folding is so complex it takes computers a very long time to model it accurately. Precise models of the mistakes in folding that lead to these diseases are key to developing techniques to cure them, and by combining the power of Internet-linked computers - more than 1 million since the project began in 2000 - the group can perform protein-folding simulations in months rather than the decades it would take for a single machine to complete them.

The Cell Broadband Engine processors in PlayStation 3 consoles are approximately 10 times faster than chips in typical personal computers at some types of calculations - so adding the consoles to the Folding@home network should boost simulation speeds, Sony said.

"Millions of users have experienced the power of PS3 entertainment; now they can utilize that exceptional computing power to help fight diseases," said Sony Computer Entertainment chief technical officer Masayuki Chatani. "PCs have been the only option for scientists, but now, they have a new, more powerful tool - PS3."

Sony said it planned to make the gaming consoles compatible with other medical, social, or environmental distributed-computing research efforts too.

"We're thrilled," Pande said at a press conference with Sony executives at the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, California. "With PS3 now part of our network, we will be able 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."

In perhaps the most well known distributed-computing project, researchers at the Berkeley campus of the University of California launched SETI@home in 1999 to help search for messages beamed from space.

More than five million personal computers in countries around the world are combined in a network that uses excess computing power to study radio telescope signals gathered by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

A similar project, 'Africa@home' allows computer users to devote idle time to fighting malaria, and yet another, 'Einstein@home', is helping an international research team search for neutron stars.

More information:

Africa@home at the European particle physics group, CERN