1. IBM World Community Grid

Posted on 15 Apr 2009 at 11:32

With the human genome now well and truly cracked, and disease research increasingly performed by computer simulation, the challenge is finding enough processing power without having to build your own supercomputer. One example of this is the FightAIDS@Home project, which started in 2000 and uses the processing power of home computers when the PC isn't in use.

According to Arthur Olson, the lab director of the project at Scripps Research Institute, the experiments involve immense calculations to find a drug compound for HIV. The process is complex because the mutated cells are constantly evolving, so the tests are "embarrassing parallel" - they need to be run over and over again until the scientists "understand the mechanisms well enough to design new drugs to box the virus into a corner," Olson said.

Scripps now uses the World Community Grid, which is an IBM project involving several hundred servers and almost 1.2 million end-points."It's an ambitious goal involving our computational arm, synthetic chemists and molecular biologists working together to test out the ideas and models that are provided in the FightAIDS@Home project."

The grid consists of three parts. There's a website (www.worldcommunity grid.org) that provides statistics and forums for users. In California, there are IBM servers used by researchers to submit and process research projects. IBM also hosts a multitude of servers (it won't reveal how many) in Canada to do the back-end processing.

"World Community Grid runs at an average of 235 teraflops, and our members contribute well over 200 years of computer time each day," said Robin Willner, the vice-president for global community initiatives at IBM. "We've had some research projects that took just a few months and others that have been running for years. The requirements are simply that the research should help humanity or the world in some way, and that the programming code used will work in a grid environment."

And we thought the requirements for the latest 3D games were tough.

Next: 2. Livermore's nuclear computer

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Author: John Brandon