Sony May Make Commercial Use of PS3

According to news reports, Sony Computer Entertainment is reportedly in discussions with a number of companies about possible commercial applications for their gaming console, PlayStation 3. This comes in the wake of its non-profit partnership with Stanford University in March that harnesses the spare computing capacity of registered PS3s for the analysis of protein cells.

The reports say that since this would be a commercial proposition that would benefit profit-making organizations, Sony is studying whether it would need to offer incentives, such as free products, to persuade PS3 owners to participate.

PS3s run on the Cell processor, co-designed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba and which can be linked with tens of thousands of other idle PS3s via the internet to run a single analytical program. A network of just 10,000 PS3s would have as much power as a 200,000-strong network of personal computers.

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Under Stanford University's Folding@Home programme, which studies how protein cells assemble, PS3 users can join the network by clicking on an icon on the screen. Stanford automatically sends packets of data out to these machines to analyze and collect tabulate and visualize the results.

Representatives of Sony also hinted that companies might have to offer each of its PS3 users incentives such as free products, or points, in exchange for their participation in distributed computing.