There was a time when the Guinness World Records were actually impressive, educational even. Nowadays, a lot thanks to all those dreadful TV spin offs, the book has been spammed by utterly lame endurance challenges and obscure statistics. But, the Guinness World Records still has retained certain amount of kudos in spite of this and Sony has announced its own successful entry, and a reasonably serious one at that. Folding@Home – the incredible piece of software that, uniquely, makes the idea of not playing games a positive thing – hit the petaflop milestone back in September. That made it the world’s most powerful distributed computing model, a fact that has now been officially acknowledged by the Guinness World Records.
"This record is clear evidence of the power of PS3 and the contributions that it is making to the Folding@home network, and more importantly, scientific research," said Masayuki Chatani, Executive Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, Sony.
Although there are now more than enough registered Folding@Home PS3 users to break the petaflop barrier, it should interesting to see how well the program performs once we’ve all got things like Uncharted, Haze, LittleBigPlanet, Home, UT3 and MGS4 to distract us and our PS3s from the study of protein folding.