What can the World Community Grid do?
You've probably heard about the IBM-powered World Community Grid initiative and you may have wondered just how useful it could be to "donate" time on your personal or business computers. You might like the concept of using computer time that otherwise might go to waste, but what good are a few snippets of computer time here and there?
As it turns out, there's plenty you can do with it - especially when those "few snippets" turn out to be the spare time from hundreds of thousands of computers.
The news: IBM and university scientists had joined forces to apply that computer power to helping find cures for some diseases with some pretty scary names, like "dengue fever", West Nile and Hepatitis C diseases. The potential? Trimming years from desperately needed research. And if cures can be found sooner, thousands of lives and countless amounts of suffering could be saved.
So it's not just computer time we're talking about. It's life-changing stuff.
And the numbers are pretty dramatic: Researchers estimate that about 50,000 years of computational time is needed to complete the calculations necessary to discover effective antiviral drugs. Running on World Community Grid, this project may be completed in less than one year. 50,000 to 1. Those were the numbers that hit me. The more computer power volunteered, the faster the research will be conducted.
The World Community Grid is a virtual supercomputer made up of hundreds of thousands of individuals like you and me who donate unused computer time (more in a minute on how it works). And not just any supercomputer, it's as powerful as one of the world's top five supercomputers.
The project, "Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together," will run calculations on World Community Grid to find drugs that will stop the replication of the viruses that cause dengue fever, West Nile encephalitis, hepatitis C, and yellow fever. Once the compounds are identified through exhaustive computational analysis, researchers can begin testing these drugs in laboratories and clinics to determine their effectiveness.
How does the World Community Grid work? While it may have been a giant step for technologists, it's a small step for individuals wanting to be a part of these ambitious projects. To start the simple and safe process, you register, then download and install a small program or "agent" onto your computer. When your computer's not busy doing work for you, this software traffic controller will request data on a specific project from World Community Grid's server. After performing the needed computations on that data, your computer sends the results back to the server and asks "what's next". Combined with the work of thousands of other similarly occupied computers, the aggregated results can yield impressive gains that accelerate the pace of research. The program even tells you how much time your computer has provided. It adds up.
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