What on Earth has happened to Life with Playstation?

Life with Playstation ended in the first week of November

I have a bunch of downloads waiting to complete; so I do the good thing as I usually do and switch on Life with Playstation as I go to bed. The PS3 needs to be on and guzzling power to complete the downloads anyway, so I may as well do the world's research into diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer. I was quite surprised, therefore, to have a message come up and tell me the Life with Playstation project had come to an end. A few clicks on a search engine later confirmed the project had reached it's conclusion.

Life with Playstation was an application that did software simulations on protein folding, and runs the FAH ("folding@home") software. The ways proteins fold (or rather, misfold) have been linked to all kinds of nasty diseases. Work is distributed across the millions of people with the software, which runs in the background on installed on PCs and Macs in order to test many different permeations and confirm each others results are correct. The PS3 version was slightly different in that it couldn't run as a background app, but had to be opened by the user for it to do it's calculations. Although this meant it didn't do work automatically, I did find it useful when I had background downloads and I needed to leave the system on anyway.

So what exactly happened? Some have reported that the folding@home project is coming to an end with the impression that the ending support and use of the application is the logical conclusion. The PS3 project is certainly over now (making it a self-fulfilling prophecy?), but recent posts on the folding@home blog stating they have a lot going on in pushing the envelope into new technologies and that they are really excited to see what the next 5 years bring don't seem to add up with this story. Additionally, work units are still coming up on my Mac application.

Maybe it was becoming too much work for Stanford University (hosts of the project) to support the Cell processor, and they were no longer getting as much in terms of computing power from the world's PS3s compared to the world's computers. Or maybe Sony became fed up of supporting software that didn't fit with it's ethos of instant entertainment. Either way I'm getting more and more frustrated with the applications and features dropped from the PS3 since launch. I'm also surprised Sony wouldn't want to support many of the other distributed computing projects in the world, such as those run on BOINC, an alternative to FAH that provides a common application for organisations to create distributed computing projects and users to join any of those organisations.

Anyway, I've fired off e-mails to the respective companies, and will update this blog with their answers.