Looks like Sony's success offering idle PlayStation 3 game consoles as workhorses for Stanford University's Folding@Home distributed computing project (link) has the company thinking about other ways to put the powerful hardware to use.

In an interview with the Financial Times published late yesterday (link), Sony Computer Entertainment CTO Masa Chatani said the company has received a large number of inquiries about distributed computing applications on the PS3.

Potential clients could include start-ups or pharmaceutical companies. Boy, talk about extreme examples. Fledgling shops strapped for cash or drug shops up to their necks in dough. Hmmm, who would you like to help?

Still, the notion is interesting. As Chatani correctly points out, PS3 users would likely be loathe to let companies use their powerful hardware for free. Folding@Home has social currency going for it... drug development, not so much. Free products, points, or some other incentive would undoubtedly be key to making this happen.

I wonder how much Sony might be able to pull in from such a partnership. A very interesting thought.

Current Folding@Home statistics (link) have PS3s doing the majority of the work (268 teraflops), while Windows PCs come in second with 173.

Those 20,470 active PS3s represent 8.4 percent of active CPUs but account for 47 percent of output. Not bad at all.