Top Distributed Computing Projects Still Hard at Work Fighting the World’s Worst Health Issues

by Andy Patrizio,  Network World

For more than a decade, researchers have been using distributed computing to gain access to inexpensive and plentiful computing resources, making use of the idle computing power of thousands of computers across the globe. Many of these projects have focused on medical research, and most recently, the World Community Grid (WCG), run by IBM on software from the University of California, Berkeley, has focused its computing power on the search for a cure for Ebola.

WCG has access to about three million devices through its nearly 700,000 members, and currently is engaging those resources in almost 30 drug projects. One of those is the Outsmart Ebola Together project, run jointly by the WCG and the Scripps Institute, which seeks to simulate the behavior of a specific protein the virus uses to attach to healthy cells and find a drug that can disrupt it.

Other WCG medical projects include the FightAIDS@Home group, which in just a few months has been able to make breakthroughs that might otherwise have taken years. Researchers at Scripps say although they have access to supercomputer resources, WCG often is a better option because it gives them access to more raw computing power. Other WCG projects include simulations of carbon nanotubes and their potential applications in water filtration. Read the article