Sony has teamed up with US biologists who run the distributed computing project, folding@home (FAH). The project harnesses the capacity of thousands of PCs to examine how the shape of proteins, critical to most biological functions, affect disease such as Alzheimers. FAH say a network of PS3's will allow performance similar to supercomputers. In fact, 10,000 machines joined together would be nearly four times as fast as the world's most powerful supercomputer, IBM's BlueGene/L System, capable of 280.6 trillion calculations per second.Before the distributed computing project, I never knew that modelling protein folding would be such an intensive task. But if Playstation 3 can help the process, all the better. However, this process only works when the machine is idle, for PCs that's okay as many are simply switched on and remain on over night or when the user is away from their desk. But who would leave their Playstation 3 idle? If its on, then someone is usually playing and I can't imagine it being idle in the same way a PC is? If Playstation is as good as we hope, then its contribution to FAH might not be that significant.