Folding@home had a good run on PS3

Firmware update v4.30 for the PlayStation 3 is set to go live tomorrow, and with it comes improvements for tracking your Trophy progress. The system software update moves the Trophy Collection menu to the PlayStation Network category on the PS3 XMB. In addition to displaying your current Trophy levels and level progress for individual PS3 titles, the Collection will finally have support for PlayStation Vita Trophies as well.

PS3 system software update 4.30 will also remove the "Life with PlayStation" from the XMB, and with it the Folding@home client that it evolved from back in 2008. Sony confirms in its official blog posting that as of this November, PS3 hardware will no longer be involved in Stanford University's distributed computing project which taps in the idle processing resources of participating PCs and (until next month) PS3s to simulate protein folding.

Since its introduction to the PS3 through system software v1.6 in 2007, Sony continually refined its Folding@home client to improve and optimize the folding performance capable of being delivered through each console; one update even allowed users to listen to music on their PS3 while the hardware was folding, if they were so inclined! With the announcement that Life with PlayStation will be ending this week, Sony saw fit to congratulate the 15 million+ PS3 users who were able to donate over 100 million computation hours through their consoles in the name of medical research.