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2010-02-05 16:59:29


Food shortages are causing instability around the world. To help combat this problem, the Nutritious Rice for the World project, headed by Ram Samudrala, a computational biologist at the University of Washington, is now using the World Community Grid to study the protein structures of rice plants.

In this interview, Samudrala and his colleague Michal Guerquin discuss how the project works and it may lead to more nutritious and plentiful rice in the future.


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2010-10-09 13:22:38


Building Thé 0.5 PETAFLOPS Machine... a New Work In [Permanent] Progress


Yes, the time is right, speculations are rife... will we be running as a 0.5 PETAFLOPS (500 TeraFlops) SuperComputer before summer 2011?

The numbers as of yesterday:

Last Day - 470 Teraflops, Peak 475
Last Week average - 452 Teraflops
Last 3 Weeks average - 441 Teraflops
Last 2 Months average - 413 Teraflops

The Challenge in on... to meet and exceed our expectations!


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2010-10-21 20:25:28


Sony Assists Researchers Worldwide With Humanitarian Research Projects

Offers VAIO PC customers shortcut for becoming World Community Grid volunteers


Sony Electronics today announced that its VAIO® computers now come equipped with IBM's World Community Grid software, helping provide scientists around the globe with the computing power to help solve humankind's biggest challenges.

All fall line-up of Sony VAIO® PCs – excluding laptops with Intel Atom based processors notebooks – will come equipped with World Community Grid software that users can opt to run.

Once activated, the software connects VAIO users with World Community Grid, a network of PCs which pools their surplus processing power to create a free, virtual supercomputer for researchers to tap. The program detects idle time in a volunteer's computer activity and requests work data for a specific project from World Community Grid's server. It then performs computations on this data, sends results back to the server, and requests more work. Each computation performed and every PC added provide scientists with critical information that accelerates the pace of research.


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2010-11-04 17:10:49

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2011-01-04 13:02:28


On World AIDS Day, December 1st 2010, Dr. Alex Perryman provided an update on the FightAIDS@Home project running on World Community Grid.


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2011-01-04 13:17:36


First person accounts of IBMers who have signed up for World Community Grid and how they are helping humanitarian efforts around the world


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2011-01-10 17:40:06


On World AIDS Day, December 1st 2010, Dr. Alex Perryman provided an update on the FightAIDS@Home project running on World Community Grid. This video contains the question and answer portion of that lecture.


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2011-01-16 18:59:46

100 years of rice research


"The world is experiencing three simultaneous revolutions: in molecular biology and genetics, in computational power and storage capacity, and in communications," observes Dr. Robert Zeigler, director general of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). "The computational revolution allows scientists around the world to tackle almost unimaginably complex problems as a community, and in real time. Although there are no silver bullets, rice production can be revitalized with the help of new technologies." Agricultural research has recently joined the ranks of scientific disciplines that use intricate computations in their research methods.

Traditionally, supercomputers were associated with research areas that required very large amounts of calculations and huge volumes of complex data such as astrophysics and geophysics. The first generation of supercomputing devices was often purpose-built machines that required specialized care in terms of maintenance. They also needed specific software development skills to optimize the use of the multiprocessor architecture. Now, it is possible to build a device that has more capacity than the early supercomputers using off-the-shelf components. At IRRI, researchers use several number-crunching devices ranging from a specialized high-performance computing (HPC) device to a gaming device modified to run parallelized statistical analyses.

Some complex tasks are daunting even for the largest supercomputing equipment. The Nutritious Rice for the World project, in which IRRI participates, aims to predict the structure of proteins of major strains of rice. The study intends to help farmers breed better rice varieties with higher crop yields, promote greater disease and pest resistance, and use a full range of bioavailable nutrients that can benefit people around the world, especially in regions where hunger is a critical concern. This project, run by the Computational Biology Research Group at the University of Washington, requires a massive amount of computing time to complete. This is where the World Community Grid comes in.


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2011-02-25 12:29:21


Watson, the Jeopardy-playing supercomputer built by IBM, has inspired tech fans around the world to donate their excess compute cycles to a program that loops the power of individual home PCs into a virtual mainframe.

Since Watson bested Jeopardy champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter last week, the number of individuals who contribute compute power to the World Community Grid project has increased 700%, according to IBM.

"Watson's performance on Jeopardy has captured the imagination of millions of viewers who understand the power of computing to benefit humanity," said Stanley Litow, IBM's VP for Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs.

"Like Watson, World Community Grid is also a game changer. We're grateful for the skyrocketing interest in World Community Grid as a result of Watson's achievement," said Litow.


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2011-03-28 16:35:58

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2011-04-27 21:34:46


On Earth Day, April 22nd, 2011, Dr. Alan Aspuru-Guzik provided an update on the Clean Energy project running on World Community Grid.


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2011-06-25 18:12:51


World Community Grid, run by IBM dwarfs all of those academic grids. With 1.8 million connected PCs, its combined processing power can equal that of one of the five most powerful supercomputers in the world -- it generally floats between the top five and the top 10, depending on how many PCs are connected at any given time. With 300,000 more PCs, IBM estimates that the World Community Grid could be more powerful than the globe's top supercomputer.

IBM's grid helps select researchers solve some of the world's most challenging problems. There are currently eight active projects, including research into cures for AIDS, childhood cancers and muscular dystrophy, as well as investigations into clean water and solar cell technology solutions. Completed projects include one that developed advances in genome research and another that explored new methods of performing biopsies.

Dr. Stanley Watowich, of the University of Texas Medical Branch, is using the World Community Grid to research drugs to combat Dengue Fever. "Our laboratory can access a dedicated 128-processor computer-cluster for this project," he said. "In contrast, during this project, World Community Grid has provided the equivalent of a dedicated 12,000-processor computer cluster."

Watowich said the complex calculations entered into the World Community Grid are typically returned within 1 to 6 months. They then need to be combined with the results from several calculations, so final results for testing take between 18 and 24 months to complete.
"Without World Community Grid, these calculations would be extremely difficult -- perhaps impossible -- to complete unless we had one year of 24/7 access to the world's largest supercomputer, which is not possible for academic research," he said.


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2011-06-28 17:39:08


How IBM's World Community Grid Is Helping Cure AIDs, Cancer, and World Hunger


WCG exploits this unused computing power by borrowing -- with the owner's permission -- a machine's central processing unit to do some serious math. It works unobtrusively, when you aren't working. You download software that takes advantage of any break, from a phone call to a pause while you're thinking of what to type next. The instant your fingers touch the keys, the calculations cease.

At IBM, a full-time staff of seven -- dispersed across the country, from Beaverton, Oregon, to Austin -- makes sure that the projects' individual applications are running smoothly, that the grid is assigning work and returning results to the appropriate lab, that problems aren't cropping up in the online member forums, and that software for upcoming projects is being vetted.

Using this powerful new tool, AIDS researchers at Scripps Research Institute are generating new drug leads to combat the growing strains of drug-resistant HIV. French scientists are learning more about the proteins behind muscular dystrophy. (Partly because of that project, the lead researcher, Alessandra Carbone, was recently named the "Woman Scientist of the Year" by the French government.) Scientists at the University of Washington are compiling a comprehensive map of rice proteins, which could help developing countries grow more nutritious, higher-yield crops. A team led by the Cancer Institute of New Jersey used the grid to develop algorithms that identify subtle signatures in digitized cancer tissues that could lead to early, accurate, and rapid detection; the results convinced the National Institutes of Health to award the team $2.5 million to expand the database.


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2011-08-12 13:27:53


Computers, like human brains, typically operate at only a small percentage of their capacity; they often sit idle as a processor waits for data. But what if, instead of idling away their down time, computers could be turned into powerful research tools operating around the clock?

In 2004, IBM asked this question and answered it by joining forces with leading science, education and philanthropic organizations to create one of the largest public humanitarian grids in existence. Enabled by IBM technology, World Community Grid ® is powered by a volunteer force of more than half a million people in 80 countries around the world who have donated the idle processing power of more than one million computers to create a “virtual supercomputer” devoted solely to humanitarian research.

This innovative application of grid technology extends the idea of collaboration to include anyone with a PC and an Internet connection. Research shows that computer users only use 10% to 15% of the processing power on their computers. On the grid, the idle time of hundreds—even thousands—of computers can be harnessed by any organization needing a massive infusion of processing power. Grid computing joins together individual, physical computers, creating a large system that distributes computing resources to solve problems.

In 2003, it took scientists less than six months to identify 45 potential treatments to fight smallpox using grid computing. Without the grid, the work would have taken years to complete. Based on the success of the smallpox study, in November 2004, World Community Grid was established with IBM donating the server hardware, software, technical services and expertise to make the program’s infrastructure run.


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2011-08-20 19:34:19

In his search for solar cells, dubbed the Clean Energy Project, Aspuru-Guzik is screening molecules for a host of properties involved in converting sunlight into electrical energy. The goal is to provide the materials that will allow organic photovoltaic cells to turn more than 10% of the solar energy that hits them into electricity, compared with about 9% for the best materials today.

That goal is still lower than the conversion ratio achieved by modern cells made from silicon, but organic photovoltaics would be cheaper and could be used in fabrics, plastics and even inks and paints. Commercial organic photovoltaic cells could hit the market within a few years. Some believe their cheapness and versatility will make them especially useful in the developing world.

The Harvard team is running its quantum-mechanical computations through IBM's World Community Grid, which harnesses idle time on volunteers' personal computers. So far, the initiative has inspected 2.3 million molecules, and should reach the 3.5-million mark next year.


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2011-09-15 13:20:48


This Perspective introduces the Harvard Clean Energy Project (CEP), a theory-driven search for the next generation of organic solar cell materials. We give a broad overview of its setup and infrastructure, present first results, and outline upcoming developments. CEP has established an automated, high-throughput, in silico framework to study potential candidate structures for organic photovoltaics. The current project phase is concerned with the characterization of millions of molecular motifs using first-principles quantum chemistry.

The scale of this study requires a correspondingly large computational resource, which is provided by distributed volunteer computing on IBM’s World Community Grid. The results are compiled and analyzed in a reference database and will be made available for public use. In addition to finding specific candidates with certain properties, it is the goal of CEP to illuminate and understand the structure property relations in the domain of organic electronics. Such insights can open the door to a rational and systematic design of future high-performance materials. The computational work in CEP is tightly embedded in a collaboration with experimentalists, who provide valuable input and feedback to the project.


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2011-09-22 10:40:25


CEP’s [Harvard Clean Energy Project] overall goal is to identify an organic material that can increase the efficiency of OPV's [organic photovoltaic devices] from the current record of 9.2% to 10-15%, as well as expand the currently limited lifetimes to more than 10 years. A solar cell with these two features could push the power generation costs of organic solar cells below that of other currently available energy sources.

To achieve this goal, the project has taken a highly collaborative approach. It relies on input and feedback from experimentalists from Zhenan Bao’s group at Stanford and other research groups. To analyze the large number of molecules, the project combines conventional modeling strategies with strategies from modern drug discovery, along with ideas from machine learning, pattern recognition, and cheminformatics. Also, the project utilizes volunteer computing by IBM’s World Community Grid (WCG) to supply part of the large-scale computational power. Volunteers who would like to donate computer time can download a free and virus-free program from the IBM website that uses their computers for screening the materials while their computer is idle.

“Roughly, every 12 hours of donated free CPU time will result in a new molecule added to our database of candidate organic materials for solar cells,” Alán Aspuru-Guzik of Havard, who is one of the project’s leaders, told PhysOrg.com. “The database will aid scientists in accelerating the discovery of novel solar materials.”


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2011-09-28 22:48:28

Sponsored by IBM, World Community Grid has offered researchers worldwide the equivalent of millions of dollars' worth of free computational power to enable medical, nutritional, energy and environmental research. At present, more than 548,310 users and 1,729,127 devices are part of IBM's World Community Grid in 88 countries, including Colombia. World Community Grid's server runs Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) software, maintained at Berkeley University and supported by the National Science Foundation.

Projects undertaken by the World Community Grid, which have yielded dozens of peer-reviewed scientific research papers, include efforts to cure muscular dystrophy and cancer, as well as to develop cheaper and more efficient solar cells. Other projects include Fight AIDS@ Home with Scripps Research Institute, which found two compounds that may lead to new treatments of drug-resistant HIV strains.

The Nutritious Rice for the World project completed 12 million computational transactions in 11,000 computing hours, in an effort to achieve healthier, more disease and weather-resistant rice strains. And the Genome Comparison project run by Fiocruz has organized and standardized the way scientists understand the role of gene sequences in maintaining health or causing illness.

IBM has been a leader in corporate social responsibility and corporate citizenship for 100 years. IBM puts initiatives into place that address vital issues, such as the environment, community economic development, education, health, literacy, language, and culture.


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2011-10-14 20:15:57

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2013-01-12 15:31:07


The World Community Grid is comparable to one of the world’s top 15 supercomputers. Its software has been downloaded onto over two million computers, which together have completed almost 700,000 years of scientific computation.


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2014-10-21 13:57:28



Global Statistic: Total Run Time 1,000,114 years
Pages: [1]

Index :: The Projects :: World Community Grid: Pt. 2
Reason: