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Sony Corp's PlayStation 3 video game console and its portable cousin, the PSP, are selling faster than expected and are poised to meet full-year sales targets even if the current economic crisis hurts holiday demand, Sony said on Wednesday.

Driven by solid demand by video games, and the appeal of the Blu-ray disc movie system built into the devices, PlayStation 3 sales are some 30 percent better than Sony's plan so far in its fiscal year, according to Jack Tretton, Chief Executive of Sony Computer Entertainment of America.

As a result, he anticipates sales of the PS3 to reach a previously announced target of 10 million units by the end of the year, in March 2009.

"We are in good shape for that number worldwide," he said in an interview. "We are tracking at 100 percent up over last year ... about 30 percent ahead of where we should be. So sales could slow down and we will still hit our number."

Tretton said sales could be affected by products shortages, which he anticipated would be "not drastic."

"I'd say we are able to meet somewhere between 80-90 percent demand, based on how things are trending," he said.

Sales of the PSP, a $170 handheld device that plays games, movies and can surf the Internet, are 20-30 percent ahead of plan and are well-placed to meet the Japanese company's target of 15 million units sold.

Sony dominated the global video game industry for a decade starting in the mid-1990s, but sales of the PS3 have lagged behind Nintendo Co Ltd's Wii console. It now has to come to grips with a recent price cut for Microsoft Corp's Xbox 360, its other main rival.

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"To have folding@home recognized by Guinness World Records as the most powerful distributed computing network ever is a reflection of the extraordinary worldwide participation by gamers and consumers around the world and for that we are very grateful," said Professor Vijay Pande of Stanford University and a leader of the FAH project.

Disease link

Distributed computing is a method for solving large complex problems by dividing them between many computers. The technique has been used by several groups to study everything from how malaria spreads to searching for new cancer drugs.

One of the most high profile projects is seti@home, which uses computer cycles to search through thousands of hours of radio telescope signals for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence.

FAH uses distributed computing to examine protein folding and how it maybe linked to diseases.

Proteins that do not fold correctly have been implicated in diseases such as Alzheimer's, Huntingdon's, BSE and many cancers.

Speed test

Until March this year, FAH only ran on PCs.

The program had around 200,000 computers participating in the program, the equivalent of about 250 teraflops (trillion calculations per second).

The addition of 670,000 PS3s has taken the computing power of the network to more than one petaflop.

By comparison BlueGene L, which tops the list of most powerful supercomputers, has a top speed of just 280.6 teraflops.

The boost is in part because of the PS3's powerful processor, known as the "cell", which runs up to 10 times faster than current PC chips.

"It is clear that none of this would be even remotely possible without the power of PS3, it has increased our research capabilities by leaps and bounds," said Prof Pande on BBC News