Sony recently announced a partnership with the folding@home project that will allow scientists to harness the spare processing power of millions of Sony PlayStation 3 users. All of that processor power, in turn, will be used to better understand the causes of diseases like Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis, and cancer.

Sony’s new processor and graphics technology reportedly packs a punch so the aggregate unused computing power of thousands of Internet-connected gamers should be sufficient to push the boundaries of biological simulation. Researchers participating in the folding@home project estimate that connecting just 10,000 PS3s together will enable them to perform up to one thousand trillion calculations per second.

If they succeed, folding@home’s distributed computing system will operate nearly four times as fast as IBM’s Blue Gene system, which, at 280.6 trillion calculations per second, currently tops the list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Researchers say this technology will allow them to “address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally.”

Folding@home illustrates one of the most exciting features of the new Web — the falling costs of collaboration enable individuals to share knowledge, computing power, bandwidth and other resources to create a wide array of shared goods and services that anyone can use or modify. In turn, low-cost collaborative infrastructures (including free Internet telephony provider Skype and open source software such as Linux, Apache, MYSQL, and Perl) allow anyone who gets connected to participate in science, politics, communities, and the economy in ways that were previously impossible. As in most instances of collective action on the Web, the key is that people can contribute to the “digital commons” at very little cost to themselves and still derive significant benefits.

Sony is not the first to exploit the distributed power Web users. SETI@home captured the imagination of Web users in 1999 with a popular distributed computing project that taps the spare computing power of Internet-connected computers to search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). The exciting part was that anybody could participate in SETI@home by running a free program on their desktop that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data. Some 5.2 million are reported to have participated and together they are thought to have logged over two million years of aggregate computing time.