IBM and researchers from Harvard University are working to discover organic materials that will make solar cells cheaper and more efficient. And they’re harnessing the power of hundreds of thousands of idle PCs to do it.
The solar power project is the latest for World Community Grid, which harnesses the power of more than 410,000 members and more than 1 million computers. The researchers hope to discover and isolate organic molecules that can be combined to convert more sunlight into electricity and thus making solar cells much more inexpensive.
"World Community Grid members will make this research possible because of the incredibly large amount of free computing power we will receive," said Alan Aspuru-Guzik, the principal investigator and a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, at Harvard. "It would take us about 100 days of computational time to screen each of the thousands of compounds for electronic properties without the power of World Community Grid. Yet with World Community Grid's free computing power, augmented by cloud computing, the project is estimated to complete in two years what would have taken 22 years to run on a regular scientific cluster."
World Community Grid has already tackled research projects focusing on AIDS, improving the nutrition of rice, and cancer.