Sony considers leasing the world's Playstation 3 power

Sony is apparently considering leasing the power of the world's Playstation 3 in one large networked cluster to select business' worldwide.

The recent Playstation3 1.60 update, amongst other things, offered owners the ability to run Folding@Home (which researches how proteins fold, which may lead to a cure for Cancer and other similar diseases) during idle moments with their PS3. Basically each PS3 is given a distinct set of calculations, it works these out, and 'reports back to base' the findings.

Obviously, the benefits for more commercial use of the distributed processing power is quite broad in similar number-crunching applications if Sony can bring it all together in a workable mode that keeps all sides happy.

Apparently, last week there were 20,000 PS3 systems out their crunching the numbers for Folding@Home. The PS3 is able to work at 0.0159 TFLOPS per CPU, compared to the average PC's 0.00095 - or 167 times. This makes it a good candidate for distributed computing for a while to come. 

Sliced Comments: So just how will Sony convince PS3 owners their PS3 should be used for commercial gain?