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Humanitarian project seeks spare CPU cycles

by Stephen Withers
Monday, 27 August 2007
! "If 100,000 volunteers sign up within the first week for this project, it could reduce the time required to complete calculations by 50 percent." Related stories Mobile Linux app developer snapped up by Wind River Canadians going crazy for shiny Apples? Demand growing for mobile content and services Survey shows suicidal thoughts frequent on U.S. college campuses Apple tops vulnerability list, but Microsoft still ahead on exploits That quote is from Stanley Litow, VP of corporate citizenship and corporate affairs at IBM and the president of the IBM International Foundation. He was referring to the latest project from the World Community Grid, a distributed number-crunching effort along the lines of SETI@Home and Folding@Home. The University of Texas Medical Branch, the University of Chicago and IBM are collaborating in a project named "Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together" (DDDT), an attempt to identify drugs to treat and cure dengue fever, hepatitis C, yellow fever and related diseases that cause millions of illnesses and thousands of deaths each year. 1.5 million people per year are treated for dengue alone. "Without World Community Grid, we would have to make inexact, simplifying assumptions that have proven to be obstacles to previous drug development efforts," said Stan Watowich, lead researcher and associate professor of biochemistry at the University of Texas Medical Branch. "World Community Grid enables us to perform comprehensive calculations that yield accurate biochemical results, and therefore give us the best chance to discover cures for these serious worldwide diseases." Around 500,000 years of compute time may be necessary to perform the necessary calculations. Just over 720,000 participating devices make up the World Community Grid, and 103 years of run time have been contributed to the DDDT project. The other active World Community Grid projects are FightAIDS@Home and Human Proteome Folding 2. World Community Grid uses the open-source BOINC software originating at the University of California Berkeley. Clients are available for Windows, Linux (x86 only) and Mac OS X (PowerPC and x86). Please enable JavaScript in your browser to post your comment! Tags See All Tags Linux Macintosh Medicine Research Science Software Stephen Withers Windows Get stories like this delivered daily - FREE - subscribe now