The most recent update to the PS3s operating system this past week included a new link in the menu system to download something called "folding@home". Yesterday I downloaded it and set my PS3 to work. This is a pretty interesting distributed computing project, and interesting too that they are getting PS3s to participate. I leave my PS3 on, and it will perform complex calculation sets submitted to it by Stanford University (each set takes maybe half a day). These calculations involve simulations of "protein folding", which is a molecular process that is important to understand for medical research. So my PS3 is doing medical research in its free time. It's cool that I can watch what its doing too. It draws images of the protein molecules it's currently working on and how they are moving in the simulation. This process is happening about 10 trillion times slower in the simulation than it does in the real world, I think, but that just makes it slow enough to see things happening instead of things snapping into place like they do at the molecular level in the real world.
You can see more information about the project at
http://folding.stanford.edu/Just thought this was cool enough to mention.
