I had to post this!
* 16 February 2008
* Mike Nagle
* Magazine issue 2643
WHEN Todd Martínez broke his son's Sony PlayStation he didn't realise this would change the course of his career as a theoretical chemist. Having dutifully bought a PlayStation 2 as a replacement, he was browsing through the games console's technical specification when he realised it might have another use. "I noticed that the architecture looked a lot like high-performance supercomputers I had seen before," he says. "That's when I thought about getting one for myself."
Six years on and Martínez has persuaded the supercomputing centre at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, to buy eight computers each driven by two of the specialised chips that are at the heart of Sony's PlayStation 3 console. Together with his student Benjamin Levine he is using them to simulate the interactions between the electrons in atoms. Scaled up over entire molecules, the results could pave the way to predicting how a protein ...
Unfortunately its NOT the full article :'(
Instead go buy the magazine to read the full thing
