* Grid computing efforts to fight diseases and search for extraterrestrial life
Peer-to-peer or grid computing has been around for quite a few years now. Corporate enterprises have shown little interest, but the scientific community has embraced it as a means to enable its compute-intensive research. Now IBM is getting behind grid computing on a worldwide scale to help create the largest public computing grid to benefit humanity. The effort is aptly named the World Community Grid.
The concept behind the grid is simple: PC owners donate the use of their computers during times when the machines would otherwise sit idle. Then an application parses out small segments of computations to each of the PCs on the network. With enough PCs doing such work, calculations that might ordinarily take years on a single computer can be reduced to months.
The World Community Grid’s first project is called Human Proteome Folding Project, conducted by the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB). The focus is to identify the proteins that make up the Human Proteome, and build the understanding needed for novel and effective treatments for diseases like cancer, HIV/AIDS, SARS, and malaria.
Of course, IBM is not the first group to exploit a voluntary grid computing network to advance scientific study. One of the earliest uses of grid computing on a worldwide scale was the SETI@home project, which is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Thousands of people around the world have offered their PCs to analyze the data from weak radio signals in space to search for signs of intelligent life outside of our own planet. Started in 1999, SETI@home is an ongoing effort, so you, too, can live out your fantasies “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Check it out at https://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/learnmore.html
Following SETI’s lead in using distributed computing, a project at Stanford University called folding@home began investigating patterns of protein folding. Understanding why protein-folding works (and why it doesn’t) could have a significant impact in certain diseases like Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s Disease. The power of the grid enabled the team to publish its first research report in 2002.
While the concept of public grid computing is stunningly simple, the execution of it is complex. Just how do you parse out data and computations to thousands of PCs at once? To address this problem, a new generation of computing programs is now available. Called the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), the University of California at Berkeley and the National Science Foundation are providing a platform that any project can use.
BOINC is a software system that makes it easy for scientists to create and operate public-resource computing projects, including those with large storage or communications requirements. Scientists in any field can sign up to use BOINC and become part of an established and successful program of distributed computing. BOINC is open source and is available at http://boinc.berkeley.edu You’ll find a good white paper about it at https://boinc.berkeley.edu/grid_paper_04.pdf
IBM’s World Community Grid is similar to BOINC in many ways, yet different in others. While BOINC’s code is open source and anyone can adapt it, World Community Grid’s code, provided by United Devices, is only accessible to IBM programmers and engineers. What’s more, IBM and its board of advisors choose which projects are accepted for the Grid. Despite their differences, both BOINC and the World Community Grid share the goal of furthering scientific research by expanding the reach of distributed computing.
It’s my belief, too, that IBM will learn a great deal about the implementation of grid computing from these humanitarian interest projects – information that can be applied back to the corporate world. I believe that, in time, IBM will lead enterprises in garnering the untapped power of their desktop PCs for grid computing to help with such projects as the development of new drugs, energy exploration, defense simulations, weather pattern analysis, and more.
Linda Musthaler is vice president of Currid & Company. You can write to her at mailto:Linda.Musthaler@currid.com
