[1st-mile-nm] World Community Grid

[Richard Lowenberg]

I've been posting about the State's SuperComputer project, because it's
need for high bandwidth connectivity is relevant to this list.   Here's a
different, de-centralized, lower bandwidth approach to working on massive
processer-dependent problems in the sciences.   See the World Community
Grid web site to find out about many other project applications.
rl
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Canadian Cancer Researchers Take Work to World Community Grid

TORONTO, Nov. 6 -- Canadian researchers expect to accelerate the war on
cancer by tapping into a global network of hundreds of thousands of people
who volunteer their idle computer time to tackle some of the world's most
complex problems.

The research team, led by Dr. Igor Jurisica at the Ontario Cancer
Institute (OCI), and scientists at Princess Margaret Hospital and
University Health Network, are the first from Canada to use the World
Community Grid, a network of PCs and laptops with the power equivalent to
one of the globe's top five fastest supercomputers.

The team will use World Community Grid to analyze the results of
experiments on proteins using data collected by scientists at the
Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute in Buffalo, N.Y. This
analysis would take conventional computer systems 162 years to complete.
However, using World Community Grid, Jurisica anticipates the analysis
could be finished in one to two years, and will provide researchers with a
better way to study how proteins function, insight that could lead to the
development of more effective cancer-fighting drugs.

"We know that most cancers are caused by defective proteins in our bodies,
but we need to better understand the specific function of those proteins
and how they interact in the body," said Jurisica. "We also have to find
proteins that will enable us to diagnose cancer earlier, before symptoms
appear, to have the best chance of treating the disease -- or potentially
stopping it completely."

The research team now has more than 86 million images of 9,400 unique
proteins that could be linked to cancer, captured in the course of more
than 14.5 million experiments by colleagues at Hauptman-Woodward.

This comprises the most comprehensive database on the chemistry of a large
number of proteins, a resource that will help researchers around the world
unlock the mystery of how many cancers, such as breast, prostate or
childhood leukemia, grow.

Approximately 150,000 Canadians will be diagnosed with cancer and more
than 70,000 will die of the disease in 2007 alone.

World Community Grid, sponsored by the IBM Corp., uses grid technology to
establish a permanent, flexible infrastructure that provides researchers
around the world with a readily available pool of free computational power
that can be used to solve problems plaguing humanity.

Individuals can donate their computers for this project by registering on
www.worldcommunitygrid.org, and installing a free, secure, small software
program on their computers. The computer requests data from World
Community Grid's server when it is idle, for example a user is at lunch,
and performs the cancer-related protein computations. A screen saver will
tell individuals when their computers are being used.

World Community Grid, the largest public humanitarian grid with more than
333,000-plus members and links to more than 780,000 computers. However,
it's estimated that there are one billion computers worldwide,
underscoring the potential for the grid and its computational power to
significantly expand.

Eight projects have been run on World Community Grid to date, including
protein folding and FightAIDS at Home, which completed five years of
HIV/AIDS research in just six months. Additional projects are in the
pipeline.

For more information on IBM, visit www.ibm.com

For more information on World Community Grid, visit
www.worldcommunitygrid.org

For more information on Hauptman-Woodward, visit www.hwi.edu

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Source: IBM


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Richard Lowenberg
P.O.Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504
505-989-9110,  505-603-5200 cell

New Mexico Broadband Initiative
www.1st-mile.com/newmexico
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