There have been many distributed computing projects on the Internet since the most famous project, SETI@Home, began looking for radio signals from another world ten years ago. SETI@Home hasn’t found anything yet, but other projects are yielding results.
The World Community Grid, with a little help from IBM, is one of those success stories. A half-million people with a total of 1.5 million PCs donated their time to grinding through thousands of potential protein targets to find a match for cancer treatment, and now they have successes to show for it. Is distributed computing right for internal corporate use? CIO Update checks it out.
Thanks to 1.5 million volunteers who left their computers running when not in use and a little help from Big Blue, cancer researchers have announced significant progress in looking for new potential drugs in cancer treatment.
The Help Conquer Cancer Project worked with the IBM-supported World Community Grid to send out protein samples for simulation testing on all of the computers. The program, running in the background of the volunteers’ computers and harnessing unused compute cycles, simulated a process called crystallization, where proteins crystallize into a solid form.