Sony's PlayStation 3: Both a Game Console And a Miracle Worker

219w ago - The PS3 has been doing miraculous things. Wait, what? You thought that innocent looking black box sitting under televisions across the world was just a game console?

Most gamers take it for granted that Sony's console allows us to play great games, movies, music, and surf the Web. Sony has made it abundantly clear this generation that the PS3 is the most useful "gaming media hub" known to man.

However, the PS3 is making a real tangible difference to lives of many people and in that regard it's on a roll.

The PS3 has truly come a long way since its initial blueprints and continues to amaze fans with its growth in every passing year. The PS3 has to be one of the most "under appreciated" consoles in the media since the Dreamcast. Do they not see what the PS3 is doing right now?

Sony knew that they had the most powerful console this generation, but did they know the extent of its potential? The PS3 is over 10x more powerful than your average PC and this fact garnered the attention of scientists, who were looking for supercomputers to use for their "folding of a protein cell" studies.

Stanford University, located in California State, has linked PS3s around the world via the Internet to harness the collective computing power of cell processors to speed up the folding models of a protein cells. The program is called "Folding@Home" and it can be activated by any PS3 user hooked up to the internet. Without Folding@Home the study of protein cell folding would take exponentially longer.

When developing the PS3, did Sony know it would one day play role in helping to find the cure for cancer? You have to give props to Sony and the PS3 for contributing to this study. While we are giving props, we should also thank all the universities and scientists out there who have dedicated their lives to making ours that much better.

However, the PlayStation 3's contributions to science extend far beyond the human body and actually reach out into the far depths of space. The PS3 is now aiding scientists who study black holes. The device they have created is lovingly dubbed the "ps3 gravity grid," this simulation device is made up of 16 PS3's linked together and was created at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

There has been an ongoing dispute over the speed at which spinning black holes stop vibrating just after formation or just after being perturbed by an outside object; miraculously, the PS3 has helped in resolving that very dispute.

Utilizing the PS3 and its cell processor has allowed for the completion of the necessary and complex calculations that previously only supercomputers were capable of computing. Not only that, but the PS3 does it on a tight budget.

"Science budgets have been significantly dropping over the last decade," laments Gaurav Kahanna, a physics professor at the University of Massachusetts, it seems that everyone is feeling the crunch in these tough economic times.

So the next time someone complains that the PS3 costs too much, let them know that they are getting a great deal on a super computer. Science doesn't lie.