Grid projects to harness PC power to cure world's ills
Grid projects to harness PC power to cure world's ills
Nov 17, 2004: IBM, along with representatives of the world's leading science, education and philanthropic organisations, has launched a global humanitarian effort that applies the unused computing power of individual and business computers to help address the world's most difficult health and societal problems.
The World Community Grid will harness the vast and unused computational power of the world's computers and direct it at research designed to help unlock genetic codes that underlie diseases like AIDS and HIV, Alzheimer's and cancer, improve forecasting of natural disasters and support studies that can protect the world's food and water supply.
By some estimates, there are more than 650 million PCs in use around the world, each a potential participant in World Community Grid. Grid computing is a rapidly emerging technology that can bring together the collective power of thousands or millions of individual computers to create a giant "virtual" system with massive computational strength.
Grid technology provides processing power far in excess of the world's largest supercomputers. It works by breaking down complex computer operations into millions of small chunks, which are then sent out to idle PC's which are all interlinked through the Grid's software. Anyone can volunteer to donate the idle and unused time on a computer by downloading World Community Grid's free software and registering at www.worldcommunitygrid.org.
"World Community Grid represents a new model for philanthropic giving," said Linda Sanford, IBM senior vice president, Enterprise on Demand Transformation, and chairperson of World Community Grid's Advisory Board. "IBM is involved in World Community Grid because just as we do for clients, we're committed to bringing the best technologies forward to address critical societal and health issues. World Community Grid demonstrates that government, business, and society can be the direct beneficiary of innovation if we are willing to rethink the way innovation and science both develop and prosper."
The first project of World Community Grid, the Human Proteome Folding Project, hopes to identify the proteins that make up the Human Proteome and, in doing so, better understand the causes and potential cures for diseases like malaria and tuberculosis.
Further projects are to be selected by a newly created World Community Grid Advisory Board that will evaluate proposals from leading research, public and not-for-profit organisations seeking to conduct humanitarian research using grid computing technology. The Board is expected to oversee five to six projects a year.
"World Community Grid will enable researchers around the globe to gather and analyse unprecedented quantities of data to help address important global issues, including public health issues," said Elaine Gallin, Ph.D., an Advisory Board Member for the initiative.
"I am very pleased to serve as an advisor for this project, which promises to harness grid computer technology to address complex clinical research questions and will inspire us to look beyond the technological limitations that have historically restricted us from addressing some of our most intractable problems."
IBM has donated the hardware, software, technical services and expertise to build the infrastructure for World Community Grid and provides hosting, maintenance and support.
The World Community Grid is powered by IBM eServer p630 and x345 systems and IBM's Shark Enterprise Storage Server running IBM DB2 database software and the AIX and Linux operating systems. IBM DB2 software can support millions of SQL queries a day as it manages the data provided by potentially millions of computers working in concert.
In addition, IBM is joined in the project by United Devices, a leader in grid solutions, which plans to aggregate the idle power of participating PCs and laptops into its existing worldwide grid.
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