Guinness World Records has acknowledged Stanford University's Folding@home project as the most powerful distributed computing network in the world. In a press release from Sony Computer Entertainment, Sony justifiably took much of the credit for that accomplishment, thanks to the PlayStation 3.

While the Folding@home project was active before Sony made it possible for every PlayStation 3 user to participate, PlayStation 3 owners have helped the project achieve this record. Folding@home uses the extra computing resources of PCs and PlayStation 3 consoles to study protein folding in the hope of developing treatments for conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Around 200,000 PCs have participated, and around 670,000 PlayStation 3 users have joined the program since it launched for the PlayStation 3 in March of this year. Together, this distributed computing network has achieved a petaflop (one quadrillion floating point operations per second). As Sony is eager to point out, by the end of September, PlayStation 3 owners alone were contributing a petaflop to the project. Hopefully that much processing power will yield useful protein configurations that will actually help people afflicted with some of these terrible illnesses.