Here comes the sun: Harvard and the World Community Grid light the way to affordable solar cells
Aspuru-Guzik said he needed to think big when he started the Clean Energy Project’s collaboration with WCG. “Our biggest challenge was the change of mindset. Usually, computational chemists who try to do this type of thing are studying 10 or 20 molecules at a time. We had to start thinking in terms of millions of molecules and formulate new ideas based on this new scale. The World Community Grid allows us to screen about 25,000 molecules every day. That gives us the opportunity to explore the molecular space, and learn about some crazy molecules that could be good organic materials.”
This is music to Viktors Berstis’ ears. As lead scientist for World Community Grid and IBM Master Inventor, Berstis makes sure that researchers get the most out of WCG. “Scientists instinctively try to reduce the size of their projects,” he explains. “They have limited budgets and limited computing time. At the World Community Grid, we help them imagine what they could do with a ridiculous amount of computer time. Partnering with us gives the researchers the equivalent of one supercomputer all to themselves, 24/7, year after year – helping them make much better progress on their science.”
To date, more than 600,000 people around the world have joined the World Community Grid, donating their idle computing time to help researchers like Aspuru-Guzik find solutions to some of the world’s toughest challenges. The Clean Energy Project alone just passed 17,000 cumulative CPU years of computing time. As a result, plastic solar cells may be one step closer to becoming a reality.
“The potential benefit of finding just the right chemical compound for cheap and efficient PVCs could save the world,” says Berstis. “We’ll likely run out of fossil fuels in about 100 years, putting us on a slope to catastrophe – the way to solve this problem is to make use of renewable energy.”