Can Intel cure cancer with progress through processors?

By Davey Winder
Thursday, 06 August 2009 04:28

Technology

While an Archbishop bemoans social networking for being partly responsible for teenage suicides, Intel prefers to remain positive and thinks Facebook might just find a cure for cancer.

Unfortunately the media is full of "Facebook is bad m'kay" stories such as is the case of the Roman Catholic Archbishop, Vincent Nichols, who has gone on record to warn that social networking is dehumanising and even linked teenage suicide to the kind of transient relationships that are formed on such sites.

Apparently Facebook does not encourage rounded communication, whatever that may be, and therefore cannot build rounded communities.

Which is why I was rather pleased to discover that some folk are maintaining a nicely rounded attitude towards social networking communities. Some folk like Intel for example.

Intel has launched a Facebook application called Progress Thru Processors which promises to help convert unused PC processing power into a research instrument in order to study climate change and fight disease.

The idea of using spare computing resources to power research via an online network grid is not new, of course, with perhaps the best known example being the SETI@home project which famously gets participants to download a screensaver which helps in the analysis of radio telescope data and help try to find alien life out there.

But this is, as far as I am aware, the first time anyone has actually thought to take advantage of social networking for a similar collective research effort.

The Progress Thru Processors application allows Facebook users to very simply donate unused processor power to research projects such as Rosetta@home, which then uses it in order to help find cures for cancer and other diseases such as HIV and Alzheimer's.

It also lets participants choose to contribute excess processor computing power to the research efforts of Climateprediction.net (predicting the Earth's climate and testing the accuracy of climate models) and Africa@home (focused on finding optimal strategies to combat malaria by studying simulation models of disease transmission) for good measure.

By simply running an application on your computer, which uses very little incremental resources, you can expand computing resources to researchers working to make the world a better place."

Developed in collaboration with the National Science Foundation-funded BOINC project at the University of California, Berkeley, the Progress Thru Processors application underscores the Intel belief that "small contributions made by individuals can collectively have a far-reaching impact on our world" according to Intel Vice President, Deborah Conrad.