BOINC and the gaming consoles

A very common request we have from the community is to be able to run BOINC and various projects on a gaming console, whether it be the PS3, XBOX360, or Wii.

As many have heard Folding@Home has announced that they have a client package for the PS3.

This is great news for all distributed computing projects, personally I think this will begin the domino effect of having all the console manufacturers want to be able to support this kind of development.

We had gotten some push back from one of the manufacturers about doing something like this at the begining of the year and since we had the stuff with the CPDN/BBC to do and then stuff with WCG we decided to put the console issue on hold.  We are almost done the the WCG workitems and the CPDN/BBC stuff is already done.

When Microsoft announced XNA Game Studio Express I applied to participate in the Beta.  Now I need to get ahold of the SDKs for the PS3 and Wii.

People should realize however, this is only half the battle.  Once BOINC is ported, we’ll have to get a few projects running on a console.

This kind of adds another diminsion to the whole notion of console wars.  I mean, can you imagine one of the administrative staff at a university getting a request to purchase 5,000 PS3s?  I would really love to be in that office when that request hits their desk.

—– Rom