Sony announced today that its PS3 console has enabled Stanford University’s Folding@home project to be recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s most powerful distributed computing network.

The record was set on September 16, 2007 when Folding@home passed the one petaflop milestone never before reached by a distributed computing system. A petaflop is the ability to for a computer to accomplish one quadrillion floating point operations per second.

Folding@home says that on September 23, 2007 PS3 users alone reached the petaflop mark. "To have Folding@home recognized by Guinness World Records as the most powerful distributed computing network ever is a reflection of the extraordinary worldwide participation by gamers and consumers around the world and for that we are very grateful," said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead. "Without them we would not be able to make the advancements we have made in our studies of several different diseases. But it is clear that none of this would be even remotely possible without the power of PS3, it has increased our research capabilities by leaps and bounds."

Via Sony Computer Entertainment