PS3 community launches Sunday Night Foldathon
Over at the official U.S. community site of PlayStation, member Xenokai posted about the up and coming event this weekend that involves the Folding@Home feature. If you're not familiar with this, it's actually a joint project by Stanford University and Sony that aims to research protein folding and misfolding in order to gain an understanding of how these are related to disease.
Anyway, the said event is dubbed as Sunday Night Foldathon (SNF), and here's how it goes: This Sunday night, March 25, all PS3 users are encouraged to turn on their systems and run the folding program. It could be anytime you want, even right before you go to Dreamland and you can just let the program run until you wake up in the morning. And that's it.
According to Xenokai, the purpose of this event is to let Sony, or Stanford University for that matter, know that their work and project is being appreciated and that the PS3 community is willing to help out. In simple terms, it's a "show of force" on the part of the community. One important thing to note is that SNF was conceptualized and is now being implemented purely by members of the community. Both Sony and Stanford have no hand on this whatsoever. Regardless, we know the two would be very thankful if this turns out to be a success.
Folding@Home attempts to understand diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and many forms of cancer among others. It will be an optional feature bundled with the next PlayStation 3 (PS3) firmware update.
