Life with PlayStation

~ the obituary ~

For five years and seven months, games consoles under people's televisions were running protein folding simulations for a laboratory at Stanford. Not as a publicity week. As a standing background job on hardware bought to play Metal Gear, contributing more than a hundred million hours of compute to a research project about how misfolded proteins cause disease.

The Folding@home client for the PlayStation 3 arrived on 23 march 2007 as its own piece of software, and on 18 september 2008 Sony folded it into something larger called Life with PlayStation. The new thing opened on a slowly turning globe. You could spin to a city and read its weather from The Weather Channel and its headlines from Google News, which was the Live Channel. Switch modes and the same globe became the Folding@home view, showing the protein your console was currently working through, rendered live. Two more layers came later, a World Heritage channel built on UNESCO listings with links out to Wikipedia, and United Village, which carried documentary material about communities in places the rest of the console never mentioned.

The numbers it produced were serious. On 16 september 2007, largely on the back of PS3 owners, Folding@home became the first computing system of any kind to sustain more than one petaflop, and Guinness certified it as the most powerful distributed computing network on earth. Over the program's life more than fifteen million PS3 owners registered. Vijay Pande, who ran the lab, described the console client as the thing that changed what the project could attempt.

It ended without drama on 6 november 2012, taken out by system software update 4.30. Sony did not replace it with anything. A PlayStation 4 has never had a folding client.

~ the case file ~

~ the console as laboratory ~

The reason this worked was the Cell processor, which was awkward to program for games and unusually good at exactly the kind of repetitive floating point arithmetic that molecular simulation needs. Sony shipped a machine at a consumer price containing something closer to scientific hardware than to a graphics card, and then sold it in the millions to people who left it plugged in.

The US Air Force Research Laboratory noticed the same thing from a different direction and built the Condor Cluster out of 1,760 PlayStation 3 units in 2010, at roughly a twentieth of what equivalent conventional hardware would have cost. Both projects were reading the same fact off the same spec sheet. For a few years the cheapest floating point operations available to anyone came in a black box with a Blu-ray drive.

~ the globe ~

As an interface, the globe was doing something nobody has bothered to do since. Ambient information on a television, at a distance, not demanding anything. You turned it on and left it turning while you did something else in the room, and the weather in Osaka went past.

The pieces around it aged less well. A news feed and a weather feed on a console were genuinely useful in 2008, when the phone in your pocket probably was not doing either. By 2012 every one of those functions had migrated to a device you were already holding, and the globe had nothing left to be except decoration around a science project.

~ what got switched off ~

Sony gave no reason worth recording. The client came out with a firmware update the way a deprecated codec does. There was no farewell screen and no final total published to the people who had contributed, which is a small failure of manners toward fifteen million volunteers who had been paying the electricity bill on somebody else's research.

The work itself was not lost, since results had been going back to Stanford continuously and Folding@home is still running today on ordinary computers. What died was the arrangement: a mass market entertainment device shipping with a donate-your-idle-cycles feature built in by the manufacturer, switched on by consent and visible on the television. Nothing sold since has offered it.

~ the second life of the hardware ~

There is a coda that says something about the whole era. Early PS3 units shipped with an OtherOS option that let you install Linux on the machine, which is how the Air Force cluster was assembled in the first place. Sony removed that feature in a 2010 firmware update, and the removal produced years of litigation.

So the console spent its life having capabilities added and then quietly withdrawn by the company that sold it. The folding client was the generous version of that pattern and OtherOS was the ugly one, but the mechanism was identical. A machine sitting in your living room, doing something it did on the day you bought it, until an update decided otherwise.

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