Pretty neat collection of vintage and modern Apple PCs.

Unless you’re playing Half-Life 2 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, your computer has times when it’s sitting partially or totally unused. That’s a shame, because there are some really worthwhile projects that could use some extra computing power. For years, there have been distributed computing projects that let you donate your unused computer time to various causes: SETI@Home was the real pioneer, and I ran that for some time, but in recent years, I’ve run software for protein folding.

Protein folding on the PS3

Now comes another really cool advance in distributed computing: the use of video game consoles! The latest generation of video game consoles couple some pretty impressive computing power with an internet connection… that makes it a perfect resource to tap into. Stanford’s Folding@Home project has announced a client for the new Sony PlayStation 3. Since the PS3 has such great graphics capabilities, that means you can also watch Folding@Home in action in real time, and can see the 3D dimensions of the protein being folded. [via Kotaku]

After the jump, I’ll offer up my grossly oversimplified explanation of why protein folding is so important. Read on, if you’d like to know more…

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Think about how many YouTube videos you could watch at the same time with this.

[Via John Nack]