World Community Grid
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
World Community Grid is an effort to create the world's largest public computing grid to tackle scientific research projects that benefit humanity. It is run and funded by IBM and currently available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X operating systems.
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[edit] How it works
The World Community Grid software uses the idle time of Internet-connected desktop computers and applies this computing power toward the advancement of humanity.
The agent works like a screen saver, only using a computer's resources when it would otherwise be idle and relinquishing the resources back to the users when they start using the computers again.
While many public computing grids such as SETI@home or Genome@home have been devoted to a single project, the World Community Grid offers multiple humanitarian projects under a single umbrella. Projects are approved by an advisory board, with members from most of the major research institutions and universities, as well as the UN and WHO.
Within the grid, users may join teams that have been created by organizations, groups, or individuals. Teams allow for a heightened sense of community identity and attempts to inspire competitiveness.
World Community Grid also differs from other grid projects by offering support for more than one grid infrastructure. The open source BOINC client is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac; the proprietary Grid MP from United Devices Inc. is only available for Windows.
[edit] History
Announced November 16, 2004 by IBM, World Community Grid initially only supported Windows, using the proprietary grid technology from United Devices Inc. which powers grid.org projects. Strong demand for Linux support led to the open source BOINC grid technology which powers the Seti@home and Climateprediction (among others) being added. Mac OS X support is now also included.
On November 16, 2006 World Community Grid announced its two-year anniversary and had nearly 225,000 members with almost 450,000 registered work stations. It had a total process run time equivalent to about 60,000 years and about 60 million results have been sent back.
[edit] Completed Projects
[edit] Smallpox Research
The first project launched was sponsored by IBM in conjunction with several other Research Participants. It helped analyze potential drug candidates for a medical therapy in the fight against smallpox virus. 35 million potential drug molecules were screened against several smallpox proteins, resulting in 44 strong potential treatments.
World Community Grid largely began due to the success of this project in shaving years off research time.
[edit] Human Proteome Folding
The first major project launched on the grid was the Human Proteome Folding Project, or HPF1, which aims to predict the structure of human proteins. Devised by Richard Bonneau at the Institute for Systems Biology, the project will use World Community Grid to produce the likely structures for each of the proteins using a Rosetta Score. From these predictions, researchers hope to predict the function of the myriad of proteins. This increased understanding of the human proteins should prove vital in the search for cures to human diseases. Work on this project was officially completed on July 18, 2006.
[edit] Active Projects
[edit] FightAIDS@Home
Another project, FightAIDS@Home, was launched by World Community Grid on November 15, 2005. FightAIDS@Home had, until May 2003, used the Entropia distributed computing platform. Each individual computer processes one potential drug molecule and tests how well it would dock with HIV protease, acting as a protease inhibitor. This project was the first at World Community Grid to target a single disease.
[edit] Human Proteome Folding Phase 2
The third project, Human Proteome Folding Phase 2 (HPF2), was released on June 23, 2006. This project, following on from HPF1, focuses on human-secreted proteins, with special focus on biomarkers and the proteins on the surface of cells as well as Plasmodium, the organism that causes malaria.
Unlike the first phase, HPF2 uses higher resolution models of proteins, which are much more useful, but those also require higher-end computers.
This project was the first to be run exclusively by World Community Grid, and not shared with any other grid project. World Community Grid have stated that all future projects will be exclusive to them.
[edit] Help Defeat Cancer
This project was released on July 20, 2006. It seeks to improve the targeting of treatment for breast, head, and neck cancers. Large numbers of tissue samples are processed using Tissue microarrays. These are scanned and processed using image filtering techniques.
[edit] Genome Comparison
The newest project was released on November 21, 2006, from Fiocruz in Rio de Janeiro. It will seek to compare gene sequences of different organisms against each other in order to find similarities between them. Scientists hope to discover what purpose a particular gene sequence serves in a particular function of one organism, via comparing it to a similar gene sequence of known function in another organism.
[edit] See also
- List of distributed computing projects
- Distributed computing
- BOINC
- Folding@home
- distributed.net
- grid.org
[edit] External links
- World Community Grid
- Institute for Systems Biology
- World Community Grid Overview Video (2 mins)de:World Community Grid
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