In late March, Sony released PS3 firmware 1.60 that included a new option called Folding@home. This allowed the PS3 to contribute to a protein “folding” distributed computing network. The project allows scientists to study all possible permutations of proteins to study diseases such as Alzheimer’s, cancer and many others in the hope that they can aid in the treatment and ultimately find a cure. The folks at Stanford got together with Sony to customize their application to take full advantage of the parallel computing nature of the Cell processor and the results were a Guiness Book of World Records event in the making.

Read the other reasons this made our list after the jump…

While not as powerful “per box” as some experimental GPU-powered Folding@home clients, the sheer number of PS3s dedicated to the Folding@home project and the fact it performs at approximately twenty times the speed of a typical PC led Folding@home to be the first distributed computing project to reach the effective computing performance of one petaFLOP, that is one quadrillion (1×10^15) floating point operations per second. Shortly after this record was reached, another milestone occurred when one petaflop was achieved solely within the PS3 platform category.

Sony and Stanford have continued to enhance the PS3’s Folding@home client to add features such as idling to Folding@home after a preset length of time, a screensaver mode that uses less power since it’s not computing the graphical display, and the ability to stream media using Remote Play and a PSP while your PSP is idling with the Folding@home client. Sony just announced a newer version of the client that is adding background music support from any audio you have stored on your hard drive as well as a time limit for Folding for those that want to donate some time but not leave their PS3 on 24/7.

That’s why the PS3’s Folding@home support checks in at number 65 on Sarcastic Gamer’s top 100 Gaming moments of 2007!

Click here for the rest of Sarcastic Gamer’s Top 100 Gaming Moments from 2007 all in one place!