World Community Grid
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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 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. The agent can also be run like an application, always running in the background unless specifically disabled/paused.
While many public computing grids such as SETI@home or Folding@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
The United Devices Smallpox Research Grid Project was sponsored by IBM other Research Participants to accelerate the discovery of a smallpox cure. The Smallpox study employed computational chemistry on a massive distributed computing grid to analyze candidates for a medical therapy to fight the smallpox virus.
The project allowed scientists to screen 35 million potential drug molecules against several smallpox proteins to identify good candidates for developing into smallpox treatments. In the first 72 hours, 100,000 results were returned and 44 strong treatment candidates were identified at the completion of the project.
Based on the success of the Smallpox study, IBM announced on November 16, 2004 the creation of World Community Grid with the goal of creating a technical environment where other humanitarian research could be processed.
World Community Grid initially only supported Windows, using the proprietary grid technology from United Devices 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.
As of March 24, 2007, the World Community Grid had nearly 272,000 members with over 550,000 registered work stations. It had a total process run time equivalent to about 82,000 years and about 80 million results have been sent. The World Community Grid updates these statistics several times a day, making the information available through a dedicated statistics page.
[edit] Completed projects
[edit] Human Proteome Folding Phase 1
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.[1]
[edit] Active projects
[edit] FightAIDS@Home
The FightAIDS@Home project was launched by WCG on November 15, 2005 as its first project to target a single disease. Each individual computer processes one potential drug molecule and tests how well it would dock with HIV protease, acting as a protease inhibitor. FightAIDS@Home had, until May 2003, used the Entropia distributed computing platform.[2]
[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.[3]
[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.[4]
[edit] Genome Comparison
The Genome Comparison 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.[5]
[edit] Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy
This newest project was released on December 19, 2006 by Décrypthon (a collaboration between French Muscular Dystrophy Association, French National Center for Scientific Research and IBM). The project investigates protein-protein interactions for 40,000 proteins whose structures are known, with particular focus on those proteins that play a role in neuromuscular diseases. The database of information produced will help researchers design molecules to inhibit or enhance binding of particular macromolecules, hopefully leading to better treatments for muscular dystrophy and other neuromuscular diseases.[6]
[edit] See also
- List of distributed computing projects
- Distributed computing
- BOINC: Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) provides free downloadable and easy-to-use software to manage certain grid-computing projects.
- Folding@home
- distributed.net
- grid.org
[edit] Notes
- ^ http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/projects_showcase/archives/viewHpfOverview.do
- ^ http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/projects_showcase/viewFaahResearch.do
- ^ http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/projects_showcase/viewHpf2Research.do
- ^ http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/projects_showcase/viewHdcResearch.do
- ^ http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/projects_showcase/fgc/viewFgcMain.do
- ^ http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/projects_showcase/hcmd/viewHcmdMain.do
