Xbox 360s used in medical research
UK university testing cells with CPUs
Scientists at the University of Warwick have reportedly been using Xbox 360 hardware in medical research, marking a first for the games industry.
Xbox 360 GPUs were used as cheap parallel processors in experiments looking at the effects of electrical signals on damaged cardiac cells.
"Instead of pumping out stunning graphics, it's reworked; in the case of my research, rather than calculating the position of a structure and texture it's now working out the different chemical levels in a cell," Dr Simon Scarle told the BBC.
This new use for Microsoft's games console seems to mirror the manner in which networked PS3 consoles were used as part of the Folding@home project, where the PlayStation Network was used for scientific research en masse. More as we get it.
