Folding app removed from PS3 with next update

Sony has announced plans to release a new system software update for PlayStation 3 (version 4.30) this week.

With this update, the Trophy Collection will now reside under PlayStation Network on the XMB and trophies earned playing PlayStation Vita games are now displayed on PlayStation 3.

Also by November 2012, Sony will retire the services available through the Life with PlayStation application, removing the application to new users with the 4.30 update. This includes the conclusion of Stanford University’s Folding@home, a distributed computing project aimed at understanding protein folding, misfolding and studying the causes of a variety of diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s as well as various cancers.

Vijay Pande, Folding@home research lead at Stanford University, commented: “The PS3 system was a game changer for Folding@home, as it opened the door for new methods and new processors, eventually also leading to the use of GPUs. The next steps, now underway at Stanford, are to take this lead compound and help push it towards a viable drug. It’s too early to report on our preliminary results there, but I’m very excited that the directions set out in this paper do appear to be bearing fruit in terms of a viable drug (not just a drug candidate).”

More than 15 million users have participated in the program since it started on PS3 in 2007. PS3 users have donated in total more than 100 million computation hours to the Folding@home project to date, and as a result, contributing greatly to Stanford University’s Alzheimer ’s disease research.