Folding@home the most powerful distributed computing network in the world.

Today Sony announced that the PLAYSTATION 3 computer entertainment systems, as part of Stanford University's Folding@home(TM) program, has enabled the distributed computing project to be recognised by Guinness World Records(TM) as the most powerful distributed computing network in the world.

The record was initially set on September 16, 2007 as Folding@home surpassed one petaflop (A petaflop is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS)), a computing milestone that has never been reached before by a distributed computing network. In addition to this, the collective efforts of our users have enabled PS3 alone to reach the petaflop mark on September 23, 2007.

The record is a testament to the widespread participation of PS3 users from around the world-currently more than 670,000 unique PS3 users have registered to the Folding@home network, bringing the overall computing power of the program to more than a petaflop. Thanks to PS3's powerful Cell Broadband Engine(TM) (Cell/B.E.), scientists will now be able to make greater progress in their studies of protein folding and its link to diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and certain forms of cancer.

Dell Plants a Tree in Europe.

Dell’s “Plant a Tree for Me” program is now available in Europe. For £1 per notebook or £3 per desktop (€1.50 and €4.50 respectively), customers can offset the emissions associated with the electricity that their computers use. One hundred percent of those funds will be donated to plant trees in professionally managed reforestation projects. The trees absorb the carbon dioxide (CO2) released into the atmosphere when electricity is generated to power a computer over its average three-year life.

Dell will continue to work with The Conservation Fund and Carbonfund.org to manage the European program. Carbonfund.org is supporting a tree planting project in Hungary developed by KlimaFa Kft., a subsidiary of Planktos Corp. Planktos is an ecosystem restoration company working to improve the health of natural habitats on land and in the open ocean. Donations from European customers will be directed to European planting operations. Dell launched the U.S. version of the Plant a Tree program in January. The European program is available at www.carbonfund.org/dell.