Foster City (CA) - Sony Computer Entertainment today announced that its contribution to Stanford's Folding@Home medical research program now reaches one million Playstation 3 consoles worldwide.

Folding@home is an ambitious project at Stanford to study the cause of diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.  It requires an extraordinary amount of computing power and has relied on volunteers contributing some of their own PC's processing capabilities to help expedite the calculations involved.

On March 22, 2007, Sony introduced a PS3 firmware upgrade that allowed console owners the option of lending part of their PS3's power capabilities to Stanford when it is in idle mode.  Since then, an average of one PS3 owner every 30 second has opted to participate in the program.

Stanford has stated previously that it is grateful for Sony and individual PS3 owners who have helped with the project.  In fact, on September 16 last year Folding@home was recognized by Guinness World Records as "the world's most powerful distributed computing network."

PS3 owners can contribute their console to the program by selecting the "Folding@home" option under the system's main "Network" menu.  Because the processing power is only used for the project when the console is idle, users do not notice any distinguishable change while actively using the PS3.