Sony Computer Entertainment sends word that partly thanks to the PlayStation 3, Folding@home - Stanford University's distributed computing♏ project - has reached a petaflop - a milestone never𝔍 before reached on a distributed computing network.

A petaflop, in case you don't keep a mathematical dictionary beside your desk, is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS). In🧜 other words, says SCE, "i🃏f every person on the planet were to perform a simple mathematical calculation, such as calculating a percentage, each person would have to perform 75,000 calculations every second for the world's population to achieve a petaflop." We said "whoa".

By achieving a petaflop, Sony says that scientists with the Folding@home program are now able to conduct research that typically would not be possible for 10 years down the line, such as greater progress in studies of protein folding and its link 𓃲to diseases such as Alzheimer's.