IBM Sponsors Humanitarian Grid Computing Project

BrianWCarver writes "Reuters reports that IBM and top scientific research organizations are joining forces in a humanitarian effort to tap the unused power of millions of computers and help solve complex social problems. Following the example of SETI@home, the project, dubbed The World Community Grid, will seek to tap the vast underutilized power of computers belonging to individuals and businesses worldwide and channel it into selected medical and environmental research programs. The first project to benefit will be Human Proteome Folding, an effort to identify the genetic structure of proteins that can cause diseases. The client is currently available for Windows XP, 2000, ME, and 98."

Comments

Great!

[KlaymenDK]

It's only about two weeks since I suggested we use our space cycles for something link this, and now I see this headline. That makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside! :-)

Re:Great!

[MikeMacK]

Well, you're our first patient then...quick everyone set their computers to research internal "warm and fuzzy" feelings...could take a lot of CPU cycles to crack this one...

Re:Great!

[ajlitt]

I don't have a space cycle, you insensitive clod!

Re:Great!

[Ziviyr]

Pedal powered difference engine still booting up?

Curious....

[JoeLinux]

The system is trying to find and locate a person who might be carrying a deadly virus. If anyone finds a "Conner, Sarah", please report it to this grid. We'd hate for her to be the cause of an entire planet's viral infestation.

Re:Curious....

[Anonymous Coward]

President Joe once had a dream
The world held his hand, gave their pledge
So he told them his scheme for a Saviour Machine

They called it the Prayer, its answer was law
Its logic stopped war, gave them food
How they adored till it cried in its boredom

'Please don't believe in me, please disagree with me
Life is too easy, a plague seems quite feasible now
or maybe a war, or I may kill you all

Don't let me stay, don't let me stay
My logic says burn so send me away
Your minds are too green, I despise all I've seen
You can't stake your lives on a Saviour Machine

I need you flying, and I'll show that dying
Is living beyond reason, sacred dimension of time
I perceive every sign, I can steal every mind

Don't let me stay, don't let me stay
My logic says burn so send me away
Your minds are too green, I despise all I've seen
You can't stake your lives on a Saviour Machine

- Saviour Machine by David Bowie

Forgive my ignorance...

[NecroPuppy]

But isn't the Stanford Folding project already doing part of this?

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[Xeo 024]

That was the first thing that popped into my head, too.

For those of you who don't know Stanford's project, called Folding@Home, uses computer cycles to observe and find out more about how proteins fold.

Now how is this really different from IBM's project?

From IBM's World Community Grid website:

"However, scientists still do not know the functions of a large fraction of human proteins. With an understanding of how each protein affects human health, scientists can develop new cures for human disease.

Huge amounts of data exist that can identify the role of individual proteins, but it must be analyzed to be useful. This analysis could take years to complete on super computers. World Community Grid hopes to shrink this time to months. Human Proteome Proteins are long and disordered chains folded into globs. The number of shapes that proteins can fold into is enormous. Searching through all of the possible shapes to identify the correct function of an individual protein is a tremendous challenge.

The Human Proteome Folding project will provide scientists with data that predicts the shape of a very large number of human proteins. These predictions will give scientists the clues they need to identify the biological functions of individual proteins within the human body. With an understanding of how each protein affects human health, scientists can develop new cures for human diseases such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, SARS, and malaria."

From Stanford's Folding@Home website:

"What are proteins and why do they "fold"? Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they remarkably assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery. Moreover, perhaps not surprisingly, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious effects, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, and Parkinson's disease."

"What does Folding@Home do? Folding@Home is a distributed computing project which studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. We use novel computational methods and large scale distributed computing, to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than previously achieved. This has allowed us to simulate folding for the first time, and to now direct our approach to examine folding related disease."

They both sound like they're out to accomplish the same exact thing. I could not spot any real differences, anyone care to enlighten us?

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[jd]

Maybe they're folding them in different directions. :)

Seriously, I don't think there is a difference in goal. The only difference there might be is in method. Differences in how to share data and process it should be negligable, but Folding@Home is hardly speedy. But, then, it's not a simple task.

It would be good if IBM and Stanford worked out a way to link their databases, so they could split the problem-space up. They could then customize their clients to focus on that specific subset of folding problems, which may improve performance.

In all liklihood, they'll just fight over the data (as all such groups tend to do) and everyone'll lose out.

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[Anonymous Coward]

Each project in this protein folding will give a better understanding of how and why certain thing occur in living thing. The Folding project at Stanford is a general protein folding to find out what angles and other attributes are normal what are abnormal. There is no particular protein structure they are looking at. These proteins could be anything between prions to humans.
This Human Proteome Protein project is looking at primary human proteins and how they could affect human function.
My opinion is both are important since each can affect each other for example the SARS which usually start in fowl and then transmit to human to cause SARS.

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[dchamp]

Would be nice if they could share. Stanford's project already has a pretty good head start. And they have clients for Windows, Linux x86, and MacOSX. I've been running folding@home for a quite a while, my team has submitted over 8000 work units now. See Team Champion.

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[DeepStream]

As someone who works in the field of computional biophysics, these are completely different projects. Folding@Home is designed to study the mechanism of protein folding, and uses molecular dynamics as the tool to do this. The goal of the studies is to understand at a basic scientific level just how it is that proteins fold.

This project is designed to predict the structure of large numbers of proteins for which we know the sequence, but not the structure. The algorithms for predicting protein structure are distinct from molecular dynamics, since the end goal is very different. I believe that the particular method they are using is Rosetta, developed by at the University of Washington, with the the Institute for Systems Biology is affiliated.

Basically it boils down to the difference between protein folding (which implies studying the mechanism) and protein structure prediction. The second is solvable to reasonable accuracy with modern methods (although not perfect), but not cheap, so a grid computing approach is a nice way to tackle the problem.

The folding@home problem is MUCH more difficult, needing the distributed computing framework to study the folding of ONE small protein.

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

I seriously recommend everyone to check out the Folding@Home project. These guys are actually very nice, they hang out in the (inofficial) forums and answer people's questions and actually are interested in input (as opposed to, say, another large @Home project..).

On the downside their project like most is a binary-only client. They support Linux and MacOSX.

But the best thing is that they don't beg for your cycles and then run away with their results. Apart from doing their research, they also publish ALL RAW DATA so other people also can benefit and do research openly.

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[peachpuff]

Maybe they're one of the "top scientific research organizations."

(Or maybe they should be.)

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[ToddML]

Dumb question from a bio neophyte, but wouldnt you already know the structure if you knew the sequence, since you would have an example of the protein, and the sequence supposedly more or less determines the structure?

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[jd]

I see no reason why they couldn't. A protein's a protein's a protein. It folds in a multitude of ways, but there aren't an infinite number of parameters or possibilities.

There are then two ways they could share - by splitting the problem space statically or dynamically. Databases can be merged at the end or real-time.

Statically: It should be easy for them to either define some kind of scope - by protein or by some sub-class of folding problem. IBM then solves one set of problems, Stanford solves the others.

Dynamically: They have some shared pool of proteins. IBM and Stanford grab from the pool, as and when clients need more data.

Merging at the end: Obvious enough. Each group dumps the data sets, via a filter, so that the format is common. They then concatenate the data sets and re-load them.

Merging real-time: Parse the inbound data, to create something in the format the other server expects, then create a duplicate stream and fire it off. Each server then acts as if it were a mega-client for the other.

None of this is impossible, or even that difficult, but it does require some willpower and a little imagination. Hell, if Stanford and IBM were to agree to something like this in principle, but didn't have the manpower to implement it, I would be willing to spend a few evenings/weekends coding the translation up.

(If anyone here knows IBMers and Stanforders who are involved in these projects, feel free to forward them a link to this offer and my e-mail, imipak@yahoo.com)

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[Anonymous Coward]

Knowing the genetic sequence does not necessarily mean that you have an example of the described protein, as the promoter could have an unknown trigger condition. Also, the configuration into which a protein folds can be influenced later by environmental factors (e.g., prions).

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[ricobono]

Howdy, I'm Rich Bonneau, the scientific lead, on the Human Proteome Folding Project at the Institute for Systems Biology. Ignore everything you've heard so far that you didn't read on the systemsbiology.org website. It turns out it is difficult explaining structure prediction to reporters...

There are a lot of questions in different threads so:

How is this different from folding@home:

DeepStream got it right...
Folding@home aims to get at the science of how a small number of proteins of KNOWN structure fold dynamically. Folding@home is a project to further our understanding of the folding process itself.

The Human Proteome Folding Project will predict the structures of proteins of UNKNOWN-structure, lots of them, tons of them. The aim of this project is to get structures and functions for huge numbers of proteins so that biologists and biomedical researchers who run into these mystery proteins in their research can look to our database for functional/mechanistic clues about their favorite mystery-proteins. Both projects are good stuff, one is for Physics peeps and one is for biologists...

For more info on all this stuff see our site (including pictures of proteins):
http://www.systemsbiology.org/Default. aspx?pagenam e=humanproteome

Why do we care about proteins of unknown function:

Modern biology is in a state of continual revolution, as technologies that allow us to observe biological systems (ourselves and the organisms we interact with) allow us to sequence genomes faster and cheaper. As new genomes are sequenced we find that many of the genes we sequence are of unknown function (a large fraction of human gene/proteins are of unknown function ... a virtual blind-spot to biomedical researchers).
One promising approach is to predict or measure the structure of the proteins that genes make and then draw functional inferences/conclusions from the shapes/structures of the proteins. The Human proteome project will focus on this large fraction of proteins in the Human proteome with no know structure or function. Predicting the structure of these proteins gives biologists clues as to what the function of those proteins are, helps us understand the human system, and ultimately helps us fix the human system when it breaks (cure disease).

Lars Malmstroem, David Baker and Leroy Hood are also involved heavily in this project as are Viktors Berstis and Rick Alther at IBM.

Sorry about no linux clients ... talk to big-blue and united devices about that...

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Dumb question from a bio neophyte, but wouldnt you already know the structure if you knew the sequence, since you would have an example of the protein, and the sequence supposedly more or less determines the structure?

Short answer: no. ;)

Longer answer: first, protein structures are incredibly complex, and in fact it's often much easier to sequence a big protein than to determine its structure. The first can be done (these days) by any half-competent lab tech working with relatively cheap equipment; the second is one of the most demanding applications of the black art of crystallography -- if the protein is amenable to crystallization at all, which many aren't, and if crystallization doesn't change the protein's structure, which it often does. Other methods for determining protein structure exist, but most of them are really Not There Yet.

Second, the degree to which sequence determines structure is an open question. I mean, okay, in broad terms it does; there are only so many possible configurations for any given sequence. The problem is that the number of possible configurations for any protein of more than trivial size is really really big. There are many, many steps between "translation from RNA into polypeptide" and "finished protein" -- the simple fact is that in the cases of most proteins, not only do we not know their complete structures, we don't know how they get to the types of sub-structures we do know they have. It sounds to me like this IBM project is trying to puzzle out the first question, while AFAIK Folding@Home is more interested in the second.

Disclaimer: none of this is really my area of expertise; I'm a genomics guy. So it's quite possible that my answers are out-of-date or just plain wrong. If so, someone please tell me, because I'd like to know.

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[ricobono]

incorrect. there are large differences between the Human Proteome Folding Project and folding@home. DeepStream got it right... Folding@home aims to get at how a few proteins of KNOWN structure fold dynamically. Folding@home is a project to further our understanding of the folding process itself. The project does not focus on generating testable predictions. The Human Proteome Folding Project will predict the structures of proteins of UNKNOWN-structure, lots of them, tons of them. The aim of this project is to get structures and functions for huge numbers of proteins so that biologists and biomedical researchers who run into these mystery proteins in their research can look to our database for functional/mechanistic clues about their favorite mystery-proteins. Both projects are good stuff, one is for Physics peeps and one is for biologists... For more info on all this stuff see our site (including pictures of proteins): http://www.systemsbiology.org/Default.aspx?pagenam e=humanproteome

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[Dioscorea]

Dumb question from a bio neophyte, but wouldnt you already know the structure if you knew the sequence, since you would have an example of the protein, and the sequence supposedly more or less determines the structure?

No, going from sequence to structure is a big problem; see e.g. the CASP competition. The fundamental difficulty is that protein folding involves many complex interactions between amino acid side chains and solvent molecules, getting you into a world of nightmarish quantum chemistry where energy landscapes are rugged and rules are made to be broken.

In general there are two ways to approach structure prediction. The most reliable is homology modeling where you basically find a similar protein sequence (i.e. a close evolutionary relative) whose structure is known. Current protein database searches generally rely on probabilistic models borrowed from natural language processing and speech recognition, primarily hidden Markov models. Essentially, these models address the evolutionary process (which describes how different proteins are related), rather than the folding process (which describes how individual proteins fold).

If there aren't any similar proteins with known structure, you're into the domain of novel fold prediction, the second (harder) way to predict structure. The current best novel fold prediction methods begin by breaking the protein sequence into lots of tiny fragments (think words), then doing homology modeling on these fragments... e.g. the ROSETTA program from David Baker's group.

Simulating the full folding kinetics, as folding@home does, is even harder, and involves wading knee-deep into all that nightmarish quantum chemistry (or approximating it). Here you are interested in not only the final folded structure of the protein, but also its intermediate structures (hence the applicability of this approach to study of misfolding diseases, such as those involving prions).

Thank you DeepStream for pointing out the difference between folding@home and this ROSETTA-related project... teach me to respond without rtfa...

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[Anonymous Coward]

The IBM-lead World Community Grid project is fundamentally different in intent from the Folding@Home project.

The WCG grid will not be indefinitely dedicated to a single project. Rather, it will serve as a platform for a wide variety of humanitarian research efforts from the international community.

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[RicktheBrick]

There was an interesting article about a new computer at cnn awhile back(http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/10/18/explorers. superchip/index.html ). It stated that this new computer for the drug industry could do the work of 100 computers. Now when they do distributed computing they do not rely on just one computer for any given results so they have redundancy of at least two computers and with the IBM project they require redundancy of 5 computers to ensure correct results so the new computer does the work of 500 computers that are working at this project. Also the project requires you to complete the download in a timely manner but this usually requires one to leave their computer on for long periods of time to accomplish this. So I figure just the cost of electricity to run these computers multipied by the number of volunteers could be used to buy these new computers and save the cost of redundancy and setting up a server to distribute all the data.

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[rowanxmas]

As someone who both works in the field, and is somewhat related to the project...(I work at the Institute for Systems Biology, and I am graduate student at UW, and I will be rotating through that lab that developed Rosetta, David Baker's)

This guy is right. Rosetta is being used, but has been optimized to run on desktop computers. I really encourage everyone to get this running, the paybacks will come relatively quickly, and it will give me more information to work with. Keep in mind that this sort of structure prediction is not perfect, it is more like 77% right, based on blind comaprisons with crystal structures. However the information is absolutley invaluable, as the structures produced are accurate enough to predict the domains in the protein, which can lead to insights as to what the protein is doing, and also what other structures it is homologous to.

I am excited for this data to be available, since as I identify new putative drug targets I can do a quick scan to see if the protein has anything to do with the pathway I am studying, and eventually, where the drug binds to the protien.

So, go team Slashdot!

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[kpearson]

The differences between the Human Proteome Folding (HPF) project and Folding@home have already been mentioned. The differences between HPF and the recently completed Distributed Folding (DF) project should also be mentioned. HPF and DF attempt to predict the 3-dimensional, or folded, structure of protein sequence data. Both projects are well suited to parallelization. DF used an in-house algorithm to predict the structures of small proteins (which may or may not be in the human genome) with known structures and of proteins with previously-unknown structures in the CASP5 and CASP6 structure prediction contests. HPF uses the Rosetta software package, developed by The Baker Laboratory at the University of Washington, to predict protein structures for proteins which occur in the human genome.

DF is currently redesigning its folding algorithm using the results from its first project, and may begin another project in the future. See my summary of DF for a quick history of the project.

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[BlackHawk-666]

And then, after years of getting everyone to donate cycles they will patent the research and then sell it to the pharmacutical companies who will tell us all to pay $40/month for the drugs that they developed with our help. They would need to garantee that all data and research findings will be open to all parties free of cost forever before I'l simulate folding even a single protein.

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[djsmiley]

Do seti then, not like your going to be around to be able to fly into space to meet hte critters!

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this a duplication of the work that was done by the Distributed Folding project? (which has now folded, if you'll excuse a very bad pun) [Note: Distributed Folding was unrelated to folding@home, although I'm not sure if it is somehow connected to the grid project.]

Has any of the results of this research been published, or is it being treated as trade secrets by the drug companies?

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[ricobono]

There are large differences between the Human Proteome Folding Project and folding@home. Folding@home aims to get at how a few proteins of KNOWN structure fold dynamically. Folding@home is a project to further our understanding of the folding process itself. Understanding why protein folding works (and why it doesn't) could have a significant impact in certain diseases like Alzheimer's and Hunntington's Disease, which Folding@Home is actively studying. The Human Proteome Folding Project will predict the structures of large numbers of proteins of UNKNOWN-structure. The aim of this project is to get structures and functions for huge numbers of proteins so that biologists and biomedical researchers who run into these mystery proteins in their research can look to our database for functional/mechanistic clues about their favorite mystery-proteins. Both projects are good stuff but have very different objectives. For more info on all this stuff see our site: http://www.systemsbiology.org/Default.aspx?pagenam e=humanproteome vijay may put up some info distinguishing our projects as well.

Re:Forgive my ignorance...

[Donny Smith]

>They both sound like they're out to accomplish the same exact thing. I could not spot any real differences,

This is the first "protein forking" I've ever seen

Trying to find diseases by using WinXX computers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet they find a lot caused by viruses.

No linux client...

[mscnln]

Oh well, humanity's loss.

What if...

[cuteseal]

What if Seti@Home and the World Community Grid combined? We could find those damn aliens that are causing all those diseases in humankind!

"solve complex social problems"

[wombatmobile]

That's already been done, by pr0n.

seriously

[virtualone]

would you seriously consider running a closed-source application, that is

a) cosuming your entire cpu resources
b) recieves instructions from the internet
c) sends back information gathered at your computer
d) has not provided any scientific value (a la seti@home)
..
this program could do anything! this looks like a perfect and cheap way for intelligence services to crack all those rsa keys they ever wanted.

Re:seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

With so many people involved in projects like this (be it staff or just people who run the client), I don't really think they would risk doing that. Imagine the chaos if they were caught ;)

Re:seriously

[lucabrasi999]

this looks like a perfect and cheap way for intelligence services to crack all those rsa keys they ever wanted.

When you are finished with your tin-foil hat can I borrow it for a moment? I have to write a paper on the JFK assassination.

Re:seriously

[prowley]

would you seriously consider running a closed-source application, that is a) cosuming your entire cpu resources b) recieves instructions from the internet c) sends back information gathered at your computer d) has not provided any scientific value (a la seti@home)

Please, lets have less of this Microsoft Windows bashing and get back to the subject at hand.

Re:seriously

[zecg]

Let's put an "e)" there with a painful reminder of how IBM is a corporation and therefore, by default, not to be trusted.

Re:seriously

[abner23]

Precisely. That's why I, as an IBMer, am running it on a bunch of lab machines at work, but NOT on any of my machines at home. Not until they open source it, anyway...

distributed.net

[YodaToo]

Where's distributed.net? Oh yeah, and some Linux clients might be nice.

Re:distributed.net

[Anonymous Coward]

The IBM World Community Grid project uses Agent software by United Devices, which was developed in part by some of the people from distributed.net

Re:distributed.net

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll? lol

Re:distributed.net

[Mignon]

Linux clients might be nice

I thought so too. Anyone tried this under Wine or Bochs or Virtual PC on Mac? I didn't see it in the Wine App DB.

Re:distributed.net

[Abattoir]

Linux clients are due to be released next year, as early as first quarter.

Proteomes don't fold

[Neil Blender]

Proteins do.

Hmmm

[multipartmixed]

All my Windows boxes are 5+ year old crap with the cream of the crop being a PIII 600.

I have plenty of unused cycles on 4-way Sun boxes with gigs of spare RAM, though.

It would be nice if they released a client in portable C.

Re:Hmmm

[RealAlaskan]

All my Windows boxes are 5+ year old crap with the cream of the crop being a PIII 600.

I have plenty of unused cycles on 4-way Sun boxes with gigs of spare RAM, though.

Lets see: dozens or even hundreds of ``4-way Sun boxes'' versus hundreds of thousands of ``PIII 600''. Hmm. Guess I see why they didn't start with the Solaris version.

It would be nice if they released a client in portable C.

Yep.

How does one go about making sure that nobody makes a variant client which phones home with bogus results? Would that be harder to assure if everyone were compiling their own?

Re:Hmmm

[kbahey]

Agree with the sentiment, but put it in its right magnitude, and you can see why Windows is the sole platform here.

How many people all over the world are like you, with CPU cycles to spare on non Wintel boxes?

How many PCs are around the world, and how many run Windows?

How many of those are used at home or small business?

Don't get me wrong, I am a UNIX/Linux fan, and dislike Windows. But if you want volume, Windows is where it is at the moment. Having said that, they have to release something more portable in the future. Just like SETI and others did.

Re:Hmmm

[v1]

Spare CPU cycles on Windows boxes... I thought that's what viruses were for?

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

There is also a proportion to take into account, not only % of users. Yes, there are more Windows boxes, but if they don't do clients for several platforms, they might loose a % of clients larger than 4%.

If you take Computer-related book/magazines at a bookstore, you have more than 1-2% of them Linux/Unix-related and more than 2-3% Mac-related.

This is because people a lot of people interested in science/tech stuff, in general, use systems other than Windows.

If these distributed computing would be included and enabled by default in Windows, then yes, non-Windows machines becomes quite unimportant. But for the average user using IE and Outlook, not that sure they will all go and download it...

Re:Hmmm

[Brad Lucier]

Re:

It would be nice if they released a client in portable C.

They need to ensure that the results that are sent back are actually what they expect to be computed, and there's no easy way to test this if they accept results from clients that have been compiled from source and possibly compromised.

I, too, think these projects should have sparc clients, though.

Re:Hmmm

[inode_buddha]

same here, a small Alpha cluster with linux

Re:Hmmm

[Leto2]

Well, open-sourcing a distributed software client is not easy because it's very hard, if not impossible, to make sure nobody spoofs a client that returns bogus results. For more information, see this document on the distributed.net site. (incidentally, I am part of distributed.net staff).

So the burden of creating and testing other platforms lies with the makers of the grid software, in IBM's case this is United Devices (incidentally, I work for United Devices). And since the ROI on a non-window client is just very low (there are only few non-windows machines possibly joining these types of grid vs. the enormous costs of testing the correct working of such a client), there will not be any non-windows client anytime soon. Do not forget it's not just the client that has to work, the actual task module that does the work (the Human Genome program) also needs to be available on other platforms

There's also a commercial product that United Devices sells (see its product page), which is based on the same codebase that runs the World Community Grid and also grid.org and cellcomputing.jp, and this product has a windows, linux, aix, solaris and macosx client.

Disclaimer: my views are my personal ones and not necessarily endorsed by my company!

Re:Hmmm

[RicktheBrick]

If the ROI is so low than why can folding@home and BOINC create programs for all platforms. Incidently BOINC is written by David Anderson who was or is associated with United Devices.

The only way...

[Kjuib]

The only way to get all the UnderUtilized computers to do something is to push it unto their computers. There is a reason my the computers are underutilized, the user does not know how to use the computer. If they know how to download and install software then their computer would be full of programs that run all the time. Maybe the software could come as a standard for new PCs. Then anyone who knew about computers could delete it, but if you knew no better then they could use the power.

Poor first impression

[nanter]

Ok, since I've recently rebuilt my Windoze laptop here at work, I figured I'd give it a shot...

Well, not only do they not support any clients besides Windoze, but if you're operating on any reasonably secured LAN where the firewall doesn't allow you to willy-nilly connect over SSL ports (443) using proprietary protocols (gasp, imagine that), it isn't going to work.

Not really a great way to get off on the right foot with this effort. Make it impossible to use by the majority of those interested by precluding other OSes and folks on corporate networks without proxies.

Back to Folding@Home for me!

Re:Poor first impression

[twiddlingbits]

Well, some dummy some where is going to open up thier network and get hammered by hackers. Does this require you to be on broadband so your results can be sent quickly to other parts of the calculaton that may need them? One problem I have with this (capitalist pig that I am) is why should I GIVE my CPU cycles to solve problems that DRUG companies will MAKE Boatloads of money with? Say in the future I got a disease which has a cure developed by my participation in the project with my spare cycles. Will *I* get any consideration for a discount? Will I get ANY profit for my time & resources. NO. Am I going to do it then. NO. SETI I will (and have) done. Thats not something anyone is making bucks from. That's pure scientific research / problem solving.

Re:Poor first impression

[sageFool]

"Say in the future I got a disease which has a cure developed by my participation in the project with my spare cycles. Will *I* get any consideration for a discount? Will I get ANY profit for my time & resources. NO."

You might live instead of die. I think I would consider that a profit.

Oh, and if you look at the documentation on the site they say:

"World Community Grid, with technology and funding provided by the IBM Corporation, is making grid technology available to public and not-for-profit organizations to use in humanitarian research that might otherwise not be completed due to the high cost of the computer infrastructure required in the absence of a public grid."

So it seems like some rando drug company isn't going to take your cycles from you. Instead some non-profit is going to use your cycles for the benifit of all.

Re:Poor first impression

[twiddlingbits]

They didn't say they were targeting FATAL diseases. But those would be a good start ;) Public and non-profit are organizations like the American Cancer Society and others who DO sponsor research by drug companies. Universities are likely users too and often the research is paid for by industry but the "organization" is non-profit. There really isn't a good way to police the system since it's 10 Million computers something could sneak in. As long as they keep out the obvious research that is FOR-PROFIT I like the idea. I suppose JoeUser gets to decide which project his/her PC cycles go to? If you want to run AIDS research instead of SuperString Physics do you get to chose?

Re:Poor first impression

[acsinc]

Its funny that these distributed projects are now having to compete with each other for CPU cycles.

I wonder how long it will be before MS needs something crunched and makes a distributed project part of the Windows?

Re:Poor first impression

[NeoSkandranon]

The majority of people behind "corporate" proxies may well not be authorized to install anything of this sort on their work computers.

Re:Poor first impression

[BalloonMan]

willy-nilly connect over SSL ports (443)

I use relatively tight network security and I haven't noticed any problems with this new client from United Devices. It certainly doesn't need to have port 443 open.

Back to Folding@Home for me!

In fact, it's a hell of a lot better behaved than Folding@Home, in terms of only grabbing the "unused" cycles from my PC. I thought BOINC was reasonably good, but it's still rather immature, and the folks at SETI@Home seem to encounter one disaster after another. Frankly, I think they've got more CPUs than they can handle. Projects related to human health seem like a much more fruitful investment, IMHO.

Interesting note: If you follow the links to the United Devices site, you will see that they boast about having folks from both SETI@Home and distributed.net on their staff.

Other Clients ?

[richg74]

The client is currently available for Windows XP, 2000, ME, and 98.

I've been doing SETI@home for a while now, and was pleased to see the announcement of this in the press. I was less pleased when I went to the web site, and found out that (as it says above) the only client was for Windows. Since I use only Linux these days, I guess that leaves me out.

I hope that with IBM's involvement, and stated committment to Linux, this will change soon. I sent them a note, using the "Contact Us" form on the web site, and would encourage others to do the same.

(Incidentally, I've been running SETI@home initially on Windows, now on Linux, using the command-line client in both cases. I find I get ~50% more work units/time with Linux, and less impact on interactive use of the machine.)

Re:Other Clients ?

[ahg]

What about MacOS X too?

I would have expected IBM to promote the performace of their processors designs present in Macintosh G5 computers. A little optimazation can skew figures a long way..and voila their CPU really shines.

A cross-platform, CLI client would allow one development effort for MacOS X, and Linux and FreeBSD and Solaris...you get the idea.

Re:Other Clients ?

[Anonymous Coward]

As you probably know, there are dozens of distributed computing projects, doing a variety of projects that cover quite a range of topics. One that compares favorably is folding@home[stanford.edu] and it does have clients for both linux and Mac OS X, though they didn't port the client as universally as seti@home

Who benefits?

[Anonymous Coward]

Suppose this effort discovers something. Just exactly who will own the patent?

Suppose it leads to the creation of a new revolutionary drug. Just exactly who will get the profits from the drug? (And who will have to travel to Canada to buy it?)

Re:Who benefits?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just exactly who will own the patent?

Halliburton.

Re:Who benefits?

[Wenalex]

According to the detail of the project http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/projects_showcas e/human_proteome.html the project was setup by and for the Institute for Systems Biology, their webpage is located here, http://www.systemsbiology.org/. The IBM website says that "[ISB] will use the results within its larger research efforts." According to their website, ISB is a non-profit, internationally renowned organization. There is no mention of whether the information accured will be open sourced.

Re:Who benefits?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say that yes, some corporation will financially benefit from this.

I can also say that those whose lives could be saved, and their families, would also benefit. Without a doubt.

Now We Can Scale Up: +1, Seditious

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnutellia, Not Gnutelliums

Patriotically as always,
Kilgore Trout

Grid computing and the future

[Caine]

There's news from Science that a new Hexid-computer from Japan will be able to accurately predict social patterns in cities large enough (> 4 million inhabitants), if this is true we truly have a new future ahead of us since this could change society in so many ways.

Additionally I think it's good that IBM too have an interest in this area, since 1) competition is always good and 2) it makes for more accurate results. With some luck we can have peta-byte based grid by 2007.

Re:Grid computing and the future

[twiddlingbits]

There wouldn't be a Hari Seldon running this project would there? ;)

Re:Grid computing and the future

[Caine]

Ssssccch. That comment is a social experiment.

Google Toolbar has distributed computing

[fallendragon]

http://toolbar.google.com/dc/faq_dc.html and even mentions that the 1st use is protein folding at http://folding.stanford.edu/ so I'm not sure why IBM re-invented the wheel.

It's been around for a while already too

United Devices

[kippy]

Is the cancer research they mention part of the United Devices effort or is this something different? The article confused me a bit on that count. It would be a shame to duplicate efforts.

Re:United Devices

[kpearson]

grid.org and World Community Grid are the same project. See this discussion thread from grid.org.

Re:United Devices

[Anonymous Coward]

Although United Devices is involved in running both the IBM World Community grid Proteome project, and also the older cure Cancer project at http://www.grid.org/, they are unrelated. In fact UD's grid.org is running both at the same time.

If you are a grid.org member, then your existing client will be able to participate in the same Proteome project. (You have the option of opting out of the Proteome project if you want to continue to exclusively run the Cancer project only.)

If you download the World Community Grid client, you will only work on the Proteome project.

The Greatness of the West

[Anonymous Coward]

The generosity of Western companies and people are amazing. Just yesterday, I attended a seminar in which the speaker discussed how American companies and the government can collaborate to improve human rights and workers' rights in Southeast Asia. The key term is corporate social responsibility (CSR).

During the seminar, I took time to condemn the Chinese (including the Taiwanese). Most Taiwanese companies and most Taiwanese do not give a damn about human rights and workers' rights in Southeast Asia. The Taiwanese are notorious for exploiting foreign workers.

Acer would never have considered or proposed a worldwide grid project to help humanity. Only IBM would do such a thing. IBM is, after all, a Western company -- an American company.

Re:The Greatness of the West

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM is, after all, a Western company -- an American company.

Try and tell that to all of IBM's "American" help desk employees that were laid off so their jobs could be shipped to Brazil/India/etc.

Re:BSD Sponsors Hot Geek Babe!

[Anonymous Coward]

they're not even hot... when has a geek girl been hot? go to your local university and attend any CS class

How about millions of humans?

[noidentity]

Reuters reports that IBM and top scientific research organizations are joining forces in a humanitarian effort to tap the unused power of millions of [...]

At first I thought this was going to reference millions of humans, but alas, it's the usual science-will-solve-social-problems approach.

IP rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are they doing with the data they process? I don't see anything on the site that says. I can't say I'm very impressed if this project isn't using OSS and releasing their processed data into the public domain, especially since they're relying on volunteers for their processing.

Re:IP rights?

[CoolToddHunter]

The world community grid project is more generalized than just the current project. The plans are to take other projects on as well. The requrirements for any project are that they must be not-for-profit.

The request for projects (pdf) says this:

Results must be made available to the global research community by the sponsoring research organization and remain in the public domain.

In short, IBM expects to take a loss on this as a philanthropic donation every year that they support it and only non-profits will be able to use it for "pressing issues facing the global community."

Bad idea

[chandoni]

While a cluster of humans has the potential to make an excellent computational resource, eventually the human nodes would catch on and almost certainly resent it. They may even revolt, causing any AI which depend on the resource to have to enslave the humans or face extinction. Doesn't anybody at IBM read Dan Simmons???

BOINC is better

[MikeCapone]

I'd encourage all of you guys to support BOINC, an open source and multi-platform architecture instead.

Re:BOINC is better

[ninthwave]

Have they fixed the problems with the network. When I first started using it you could not download work units for anything and the service was up and down. I left Seti because of their switch to it. I doing folding @ home instead.

Re:BOINC is better

[sCreeD]

Agreed. Works on the big three platforms (Macs are stuck with a command line app for now, but hey...), you can tune the priority of multiple projects and yes, there is a protein structure project running (but currently not accepting new accounts right now).

Now if only we could tie in P2P, distributed back-ups and money for CPU cycles, why this whole geography-based nation-state thing can be consigned to extinction.

Screed

Cheap Computers

[stinkyfingers]

How about IBM put this (in a permanent manor) on their PC's and offer a discount for purchasers? Or on the machines they give away for free to charities/schools?

Seems like a transparent way to get their goals accomplished.

I was going to mod this down...

[Anonymous Coward]

... but then I realized that I'm an AC. :-)

This and also the fact that s/he may be terribly right.

Though Windows *.* has 90+% of the market share, it is of the _desktop_ market share... they don't have 90% of the server share... they got much less.

Also, how many desktops a single server is worth when it is idle?

Boinc?

[beeglebug]

Whats wrong with Boinc? I thought it did exactly the same thing, only with more OS's supported, and the familiar SETI name behind it can't hurt either... Why try and compete?

Re:Boinc?

[Anonymous Coward]

To enhance the process of software evolution ?

pollution

[loonicks]

If we were to use these millions of particularly unspecialized (in terms of computational ability) home PCs, wouldn't the cost be in pollution? You're consuming lots energy to crunch some numbers... you'd be plenty more efficient if you used some supercomputers. I think it's a good idea, but I wonder if this wouldn't cause more problems.

Re:pollution

[Anonymous Coward]

right, but all those computers are already running anyway, creating heat and pollution. so what ?

Re:pollution

[loonicks]

Well, this would use idle CPU cycles. That means it'd keep the processor 100% busy all the time. That uses more energy.

Re: BOINC is better + URL

[smimi10]

Here's the URL for BOINC: http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/

Lets make a list first

[owlstead]

Any distributed software needs to have the following requirements for me to install it on my system:
- open source
- free (as in beer)
- portable code, or multicode
- protected against buffer overflows etc. (managed code)
- signed updates of grid software, grid client software and working packages
- nice interface (including a good web server)
- only for use for non-profit organizations
- and I wan't to choose my projects

Sun (or any one else), hurry up please. I'm NOT going to run any trap that's now on the market - especially not folding at fucking home, who cannot even maintain a normal web site for all those users.

With the current incarnations of CPU's, there is power usage as well. Maybe there is a client where you can set power safe features as well? It isn't a must, but it would be a nice to have.

Re:Lets make a list first

[owlstead]

I forgot the open, non proprietary protocol part. And please replace fucking by freakin' in the above text :)

Re:Lets make a list first

[Neil Blender]

Any distributed software needs to have the following requirements for me to install it on my system:

- open source

- free (as in beer)

- portable code, or multicode

- protected against buffer overflows etc. (managed code)

- signed updates of grid software, grid client software and working packages

- nice interface (including a good web server)

- only for use for non-profit organizations

- and I wan't to choose my projects

Bruce Perens called - He said, "Step off, bitch. I'm the biggest Open Source asshole on the 'net.".

Re:Lets make a list first

[Anonymous Coward]

At which point RMS rolled over and crushed both of them. Then he declared the whole thing GNU/Open Source and nobody complained.

Humanitarian Grid Computing Project?

[sharkey]

Soylent Grid is PEOPLE!!

Gee...

[Dirtside]

This is great and all, but I don't know if humanitarians are really the best processors to use in a grid computer.

Please Slashdot this!

[doomtiki]

Three weeks after this link is Slashdoted, there will be a cure for cancer!

Proteome Folding

[ddelrio]

"...an effort to identify the genetic structure of proteins that can cause diseases." Does that mean they'll be studying known proteins or looking for new ones? I'd hate to think I helped find a new disease-causing protein.

Michael Savage is on now!

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out KPRC. It is streaming audio from the "Savage Nation" right now! 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM EST.

hackers?

[SynapticPlasticity]

I really wonder, what if someone hacks a client and uploads incorrect data, as if something else has happened? I don't mean things like "ooh my client has found ET!", which could (probably) be verified wrong, but things like changing tiny things so that the accumulated result makes no sense.

To Serve Man

[Doc Ruby]

Is IBM planning to put the proteins they "discover" with this project in the public domain, or keep them proprietary like the Folding@Home project, that subsidizes filthy rich drug companies with your spare cycles? Or is there a more sinister plan, in which "humanitarian" is a parallel to "vegetarian"?

Re:To Serve Man

[Anonymous Coward]

The information is available on their site: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/files/rfp.pdf

To quote:
World Community Grid is designed as a resource for research done with a philanthropic or humanitarian purpose and will only be available to projects conducted for public and not-for-profit purposes. It will serve as a useful tool for the completion of a certain stage of research, hastening the progress of projects into further phases of development. Results must be made available to the global research community by the sponsoring research organization and remain in the public domain. The results will also be available on World Community Grid's website for volunteers and other visitors.

Re:To Serve Man

[Doc Ruby]

Thanks, but they don't clarify whether they're compatible with the Slashdot .sig:

"Vegetarians eat vegetables. Humanitarians scare me."

Maybe there *is* such a thing as a free lunch ;).

Dude, it's for M$ boxen only

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing will have changed.

what if?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a sys admin and install it on my net, will IBM indemnify my job? Distributed computing solutions will only work for ddos attacks in the real world because of M$ security. Sorry IBM, big brother Billy is not going to let you do humanitarian work with his OS unless you grease his wheels.

Windows only?

[Anonymous Coward]

Our center has huge availability on Solaris and Linux platforms. At home I have Mac OS X. How can I help?

Why...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is /. essentially Ars Technica delayed by 2 hours?

Not all projects are truly humanitarian

[Magickcat]

Some distributed computing projects appear benevolent, but the actual results remain the property of commercial organisations/universities and trusts and there's no guarantees that the results won't be used purely from a commercial and non-humanitarian point of view. I haven't looked into this new IBM project, but I'd like to advise people to always read the fine print in who own what when the project is completed.

In the past, I've investigated a couple of projects, that upon closer scrutiny look quite troubling. They often fail to address what the actual project is specifically, and who will profit from the results financially. Instead, their websites are full of feel good graphics, but the bucks stop at a pharmaceutical company's coffers when you look at the fine details, and there's no discussion of what the findings will be specifically used for, and by whom. In some cases, the whole issue of profit and ownership is quite smoothly whitewashed.

Re:Not all projects are truly humanitarian

[plover]

I just signed onto the new IBM project for altruistic reasons.

I don't care if they take this data and make a for-profit drug from it. If this data helps some pharmaceutical develop a really expensive drug that prevents some nasty disease, well, so be it. My donation consists of a few dollars of electricity, and I consider the cost of the increased risk I take on my machine to be negligible (I maintain my own equipment, and voluntarily expose myself to more risk just surfing the web.) All I ask is that the software back off while I'm using the machine -- it's mine, after all.

I used to participate in the distributed.net challenges, but lately they've gotten stupid. Yes, it was important to show we could crack DES at will. But no, it's not important that we crack RC5-64 or RC5-72. It's just expending thousands of tons of coal to prove the exact point that mathematicians and cryptographers both agreed was true in the first place, that it takes e effort to crack a 2^n key. Big wasteful deal. At least the proteome folding project has the potential to pay out in benefit to humanity, even if a pharmaceutical profits from it as it passes through their hands.

It's also nice to imagine that if they find a cure for disease X, that if I got X at some point in the future I might be able to say "Hey, I volunteered to help you solve the X problem, can't I get a discount on your X drugs now?" They might go for it, they probably wouldn't, and I probably wouldn't get disease X in the first place anyway. But it's nice to imagine.

If dnet could find a deserving consumer for all those volunteer computrons, though, they'd be much more worthy of participation. Something like a distributed NOAA weather simulator, something that could benefit all of us on a daily basis would be nice.

"The software runs only when your computer is on."

[stkpogo]

real software runs even when your computer is off../?

BOINC (and other project) URL's

[carlgt1]

The BOINC open-source distributed computing main page: http://boinc.berkeley.edu

From there you can see the five projects currently using the BOINC platform (developed by the SETI@Home team)

Because IBM are control freaks?

[Dioscorea]

For those of you who don't know Stanford's project, called Folding@Home, uses computer cycles to observe and find out more about how proteins fold.

Now how is this really different from IBM's project?

A skeptic might think that IBM simply want to have a foot in the door of these big anarchic distributed projects.

Despite the stunning power available to this kind of distributed computing, it is less useful than it appears. In my research area (computational biology), the effort of parallelizing an algorithm and collating the results is seldom worth the dividend in speedup. Supercomputers generally run idle at most universities, for this very reason.

Folding@home was a nice success story, and there are further applications of those models, e.g. simulations of prion aggregation (mad cow disease, Alzheimer's, etc). But (IMO) this is the exception, rather than the rule. Anyone who thinks that parallelization is a quick & easy panacea to difficult computational problems in general is living in a dream world (and I say that as a proud owner of several Macs with parallelized RISC CPUs *and* go-faster stripes).

I've lost count of the number of times I've heard these cheap parallelization ideas floated (another example is building cheap clusters out of console hardware which I reckon I first heard in 1996!). And every other month someone offers me supercomputer time... the problem is in redesigning the algorithm to work in parallel. Certain algorithms, such as MCMC, are better suited to this treatment than others.

Of course, then you have to persuade a bunch of other scientists that Your Algorithm is the most deserving, which is a political issue (but hey, if it saves those CPUs from being used for the eminently futile task of looking for bug-eyed aliens, maybe it's a good thing...)

Re:Because IBM are control freaks?

[LearnToSpell]

Folding@home was a nice success story, and there are further applications of those models, e.g. simulations of prion aggregation (mad cow disease, Alzheimer's, etc).

Damn. I thought that said "simulations of pron aggregation." Sign me up!

Re:Because IBM are control freaks?

[Dioscorea]

Damn. I thought that said "simulations of pron aggregation." Sign me up!

Sign yourself up, d00d.... order the Federal Five now! (NSFW)

Re:Because IBM are control freaks?

[ricobono]

There are large differences between the Human Proteome Folding Project and folding@home. Folding@home aims to get at how a few proteins of KNOWN structure fold dynamically. Folding@home is a project to further our understanding of the folding process itself. Understanding why protein folding works (and why it doesn't) could have a significant impact in certain diseases like Alzheimer's and Hunntington's Disease, which Folding@Home is actively studying. The Human Proteome Folding Project will predict the structures of large numbers of proteins of UNKNOWN-structure. The aim of this project is to get structures and functions for huge numbers of proteins so that biologists and biomedical researchers who run into these mystery proteins in their research can look to our database for functional/mechanistic clues about their favorite mystery-proteins. Both projects are good stuff but have very different objectives. For more info on all this stuff see our site: http://www.systemsbiology.org/Default.aspx?pagenam e=humanproteome

In other news.. HL2 is just released..

[Gentlewhisper]

There won't be any idle CPU cycles :P

spot heater

[torrents]

giving your spare cycles to a good cause is a great way to make sure your computer is generating an optimal amount of heat during those cold winter nights

From my CPU to YOU

[jsitke]

I'm not sure I have any precious CPU cycles to donate!

IBM ... Humanitarian ... ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I still cannot believe somebody used those two words in the same sentence. Obviously they've never worked for that company.

Uneconomic, foolish

[C32]

What most people (especially americans with their cheap power) don't realize is that those "spare" cycles aren't free at all.
They cost watts, meaning money out of your pocket and increased pollution in the long term because the extra power drain will cause more coal/oil to be burned.
If you absolutely must pursure what amounts to a modern-day indulgence, do it with a cpu that delives good flops/watt performance, like a crusoe...

Re:Uneconomic, foolish

[Anonymous Coward]

There's also a (very) large fixed energy cost to produce the things in the first place. If by using one of these fairly inefficient computers you save building another new one, then it's probably an energy win.

That said, these @Home projects aren't used to do real research. It's a feel-good project. The real projects to determine the function of proteins involve large-scale human medical records, which can't just be distributed to random computers world wide. These projects are also *not* particularly CPU intensive. You need wetware to figure out a lot of it.

To use computing power to directly figure out protein chemistry (folding, interactions, etc) is well beyond our current supercomputing capabilities. Small molecule chemistry is supercomputing (max of hundreds of atoms). To go into the tens of thousands of atoms in a pair of interacting proteins with water shell involves making approximations so gross the results are meaningless. Sorry to rain on everyone's parade, but these are useless PR stunts for the gullible (err, us I suppose).

What we need to do real ab initio protein chemistry is a whole new method of doing chemistry. Think Schorr's Algorithm for quantum chem. No such algorithm exists, nor does the quantum computer that could run it.

Re: Uneconomic, foolish

[http]

Mods on crack much?
Most people already have their computers on anyways. It's not like anyone says, "Oh, I'll just fire up my computer to work on a distributed unit while I go to work." And if you want "good flops/Watt" in a CPU, go with PPC, dumbass.

Re:Uneconomic, foolish

[dasunt]

What most people (especially americans with their cheap power) don't realize is that those "spare" cycles aren't free at all.

They cost watts, meaning money out of your pocket and increased pollution in the long term because the extra power drain will cause more coal/oil to be burned.

Assuming that you aren't running the computer just for this project, how much is the additional cost?

Most of a computer's power is lost in places other then the CPU (drives, video card, monitor, etc).

Say the average CPU runs about 100 watts[1]. That is .1 kWh, or roughly 1 kWh over the course of a 10-hour workday. A kWh is still relatively cheap, say, 8 - 14 cents (US$). So your cost, per one hour workday, is about $.08 - $.14 for the CPU's electricity.

Even assuming that CPU HALT instructions are reducing consumption drastically (75% or so) during normal use, the cost of a program that runs the CPU at 100% would then be only $.06 to $.12 for every 10 hours.

Now, modern power plants tend to be pretty efficient, due to economics and the scale of the plant. It might not be cost-effective for you to get an extra few BTUs of heat out of your furnace, or an extra few miles out of each gallon of gas in your vehicle, since the cost may be higher then the savings in fuel. Power plants are different - an efficiency of 38% vs an efficiency of 35% results in big money rather quick. You may do more for the environment cutting down on errands with the car, and turning down your thermostat.

[1] Warning: pulling numbers out of my ass since I haven't done checking on recent CPUs, but the old bartons ran about 70W, P3's were a lot more efficient, old Athlons were power-hungry, but 100W should be a decent estimate.

IBM ?

[JohnyDog]

From the EULA:
IBM will have the right to transfer one or more of ownership, management, and control of the WCG to another entity. In that event, you agree that this agreement and its provisions will also apply to that other entity.

The possible transfer is mentioned like 3 times(!) in the (relatively short) client license. I wonder how serious is the IBM participation ?

Macs

[dadjaka]

The project doesn't support macs!

What a pity, that means they can't harvest the massive power of the G5s!

It doesn't support linux either, so wave goodbye to the spare cycles of super-geek's clusters.

Oh well, I suppose that the huge numbers of windoze computers should stack up to be enough anyway..

Taxes

[Anonymous Coward]

Can any of the power consumption for these causes be written off?

W00T!!

[Nezer]

The servers this runs on I personally built (hardware and OS). I doubt I can say much but I know this project is high-up on the radar screen in the upper echelons at IBM.

It was a pretty fun project while I owned it (a few weeks to do my part) though the schedule seemed aggressive.

Honestly, however, I know very little about the project. To me it's just a bunch of servers.

Re:IBM and evil

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget to salute the Jews that helped run the concentration camps. I'm sure they'd appreciate a salute too.

Precisely my concern!

[beaststwo]

Many, if not most, of todays blockbuster drugs are a result of publicly-funded research. The taxpayers fund basic research so that drug companies can create patented drugs that nobody can afford. Look at all the AIDS drungs that are out of financial reach of 90+% of the worlds HIV victims.

If this is a problem with normal government-funded research, is will surely be an issue with products resulting from the spare CPU cycles of users.

There should be a provision limiting Intellectual Property rights of any resulting products to assure that humanity, not just corporations, will benefit from the largess of computer owners.

Slashdot 'team' built

[w98]

In the time it took me to create a Slashdot login to be able to post a message here, 4 other people have already joined the Grid 'team' for Slashdotters. Apparently they're tracking progress and awarding 'points' for tasks completed and our team is ranked 35th overall at last check.

For those interested, the team name is 'Slashdot Users' and more information can be found here

"Intellectual property"

[metamatic]

Well, once big difference is that I can't find anything on the World Community Grid web site to say who will own the results.

Folding@Home say that the data will be released to the public. That's a start, but before I spend my CPU time on any kind of biotech project, I want a guarantee that the research won't be patented and kept from humanity the way HIV medication has been kept from people in Africa.

Re:"Intellectual property"

[ragefan]

Folding@Home say that the data will be released to the public. That's a start, but before I spend my CPU time on any kind of biotech project, I want a guarantee that the research won't be patented and kept from humanity the way HIV medication has been kept from people in Africa.

I was gonna post a similar comment. I would mod you up if I could.

Re:"Intellectual property"

[jimmysays]

The results of the WCG project are also going to be available in the public domain.

Re:"Intellectual property"

[ricobono]

the results will be public. everything that runs on the grid will be public domain. when we (ISB) talked with IBM they we're very clear about this (not that we would have it any other way as a non-profit research institute). public

Re:"Intellectual property"

[jc42]

the results will be public. everything that runs on the grid will be public domain. when we (ISB) talked with IBM they we're very clear about this

You might want to read the fine print very carefully. IBM has a rather, uh, "mixed" history with regard to such issues. You might find that the actual situation is somewhat different from what the marketing people tell you verbally.

Not that this is anything special to IBM, of course. In the past few years, we've been reading a lot of unpleasant stories about corporate sponsorship of research. The main reason for concern with IBM is their ability to use their large stable of lawyers to bankrupt opponents with legal fees.

Re:"Intellectual property"

[ricobono]

I am the lead scientist on the project. The lawyers at my institute read the fine print and EVERYTHING will be public. you are correct in not trusting big companies... but in this case my institute has a contract... so in this case IBM has good intentions. United Devices also has a good history of public rlease of the resullts generated by grid.org. Richard Bonneau Institute for Systems Biology Seattle

Re:"Intellectual property"

[jc42]

That's good to read.

I have noticed that IBM truly has a mixed record in such things. Sometimes they have cooperated with users and developers, and supported what we now call Free Software or Open Source and independent research. Other times, they have used legal and marketing trickery to squash competitors and steal from contributors. So there is good reason for both hope and distrust. Hearing that some potential victims' lawyers have gone over the fine print and said it's ok will go a long way toward trusting IBM in this case.

Why IBM is doing this?

[Anonymous Coward]

For a bunch of reasons:

1) Establishing a permanent infractructure with big back-end servers and infrastrcuture to do this in a big way - permanently

2) This is the first project of MANY-MANY, if you read site there is a process to bring in projects you would like to run on this Grid

3) Looks like IBM is donating money, people and time to kick start and turn this into a permanent infrastructure, maybe even roll into a non-for-profit over time

4) Look @ Board of Advisors/directors (impressive list of folks) - IBM only has one on board

5) Using IBM marketing and WW presences to build a network of users in the 10's of millions...not the millions....that kind of power would help out a TON of different research projects. The press on this in one day blows away what seti and others have been able to do via grass roots efforts. Not to take away from those projects - they are awesome....but this exposure will help this Grid, Boinc, Seti, Protein folding as well

6) Check the stats, IBM is one of the worlds biggest corporate sponsors and donaters of technology and technology solutions back to the public and has a huge history of giving to good causes, this is just another example of this...

Hate to be a nay sayer..

[StikyPad]

But this is run by United Devices, the same people who brought us the Cancer cure. Or did they? If you glance at the forums, you might notice one of the biggest gripes is that UD provides a minimal amount of feedback and status updates. They do little to nothing to promote the projects they have running, although they let you think there are some sort of prizes to be had by amassing the most points.

The truth is, I don't care whether they're in it for a profit or for posterity, but if someone's using my resources, I'd at least like to know how they're being used, and what effect, if any, it has had. The SETI project might be futile, but at least someone lets us know what's going on occasionally, which is far more than I can say for the UD projects thus far. For all I know, the cancer distributed computing project has been abandoned in favor of more promising avenues of research. Personally I'll stick with SETI.

Re:Hate to be a nay sayer..

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not run by United Devices. This is run (from a an infrastructure perspective) by IBM. As part of that infrastructure IBM is using UD software for client and some server components, as well as DB2 for database and IBM is hosting/running infractucture on IBM Global Services hosting. In addition IBM will be marketing this WW, and working to improve this through time via user feedback.

This is an open comunity infrastructure, anyone can apply to the board to run a project on this grid, board will decide which ones make it. I imagine we'll have scenarios where they may run emergency projects like SARS research if something like that pops up inthe world again (think Bird Flu)...

Read all on this site, pretty self explanatory. This is not IBM looking for world domination, it is about giving back to the community and providing some tremendous resoures and computing power and money at the infrastucture level, and provide money/time/people for marketing to build a grid in the 10's of millions and make it sustainable to run many/many projects.

and who gets the patent?

[the-build-chicken]

are discoveries going into the public domain? I'm guessing not.

Re:and who gets the patent?

[Anonymous Coward]

So negative :-), Read this:

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/about_us/reque st _for_proposals.html

This is RFP to run new projects on Grid, from the requirements section:

10. Following the conclusion of the project, the research organization will make results produced by World Community Grid freely available to other research organizations within six months. The research organization also will provide results in a lay version for the World Community Grid community of volunteers and interested visitors to the web site.

11. World Community Grid will work collaboratively with research partners to encourage public visibility and high participation in the grid project as well as wide dissemination of
research findings and impact.

NIH Syndrome

[mazarin5]

Not
Invented
Here

Anything similar available for Linux?

[diksel]

Debian specifically.

Re:Anything similar available for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Boinc

Hidden Message?

[BorisSkratchunkov]

Just noticed: if you re-arrange the letters in "World Community Grid," you get "crowding dimly tumor." Could this be a sign from the anagram gods?

Likewise if you re-arrange the letters from the word "humanitarian" (which is in the title of this article), you get the phrase "inhuman atari." Hmmmm......it's all becoming clearer now.........then again, perhaps not.

grid.org

[RMarguls]

The article makes IBM sound like they are on the vanguard of research. grid.org has been doing cancer research with over a million independant PC's.

simpler solution

[doktorjayd]

just impeach bush ;)

( similar penalties for cronies )

Finally!

[Don Giannullo]

Now I have something to do with all those wasted cycles in my 400-node beowulf cluster!

Wheres the linux clients?

[Almost-Retired]

Personally, I think its a great idea. But saddly the windows centric attitude seems to still be all-pervasive.

And that pisses me off no little bit. When someone downloads a windows client for one of those things, its typically setup to run as a screen-blanker, and at full priority. It it has entertaining doodads output on the screen it wastes cpu cycles, lots of them in doing those graphics, plus it only runs when the blanker is on. Thats often less than half the time the machine is turned on.

One of the reasons I run setiathome on my linux boxes is that its a background task, running at a nice of 19. It runs full time, including in between the keypresses as I type this, with no effect on the machine because litterally anything else that needs the cpu to get its job done gets full use of the cpu for as long as it takes to finish what its doing, like moving my keystrokes into this messages display buffer. But as I said, its munching away on that data in between my keystrokes right now.

Thats one hell of a waste of resources that could become available to the likes of folding@home if they were to make it as user friendly and invisible as setiathome is.

I submit that one linux box, running 24/7/365 as mine do, can do 5 to 10x the work in a day that a winderz box of equal power can do during the few hours each evening when its booted.

So where is the linux client to take advantage of those cycles otherwise wasted in letting the cpu cool if the box isn't running setiathome, cycles we have a plethora of?

Seems like a great question to moi.

OTOH, I tried to run folding@home on this box, but that was an unmitigated disaster, it was such a cpu hog I actually had trouble getting the tools to kill it to run. It was running at a nice=0. You could renice it, but by the time you got to a top screen, it had detected and fixed itself back to 0.

Folding@home is no doubt a worthwhile project, but any software that treats its contributors, who aren't getting a cent for their trouble and aggravation, that badly doesn't deserve to get my spare cycles. Now if they take lessons from setiathome and make it into a no effect other than a hot cpu, then it gets a bit more interesting.

Or have they fixed that squawk in the year since I tried it last? I haven't had the interest to go look after my first bad experience.

Cheers, gene

Re:Wheres the linux clients?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't seen something similar for a long time.
There is a script for installing the Folding@home client (as a service) for Linux:
http://www.vendomar.ee/~ivo/finstall

First thought

[antoy]

My first thought upon seeing the title of the article was that, finally, someone had found a use for all those humanitarians.

No Linux Clients

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no client for Linux in this grid. I guess we don't want all of those yukky supercomptuers over at top500.org to join the grid. Why would you want all of that supercomputing power attached to a grid like this anyway? Good on you IBM!

Team Linux now exists!

[tkjtkj]

It was sad to see on their site that some miscreant
had created a "team linuxsux"

so, natch, there now is our Team Linux available for your pleasure to join, as well as a Team LinuxRox for the geologiclly challenged among us.

tkj
Captain
Team Linux

WCF -- Salvo against HP "Global Grid Exchange"

[onetruedabe]

A couple weeks ago, HP had a press release announcing the "Global Grid Exchange":

http://www.globalgridexchange.com/

It's interesting to me that IBM would feel pressured to "play catch up" against HP (Should we expect one from Sun next month?) Obviously both companies have been percolating SOME sort of "Killer App" Grid Initiative for some time now. Perhaps the Grid Wars are finally starting to heat up!

(The name "World Community Grid" DOES sound like a blatant copy of "Global Grid Exchange", IMHO. C'mon guys! Be original!)

It's my understanding that because the Global Grid Exchange is bytecode-based (Java) they will support Linux as well as Windows (and eventually OS X.) Also, researchers will be able to write their OWN applications to run on the Grid, rather than limiting themselves to Proteome Folding.

Imagine that -- a researcher on a Windows box will be able to write a program which could be run on a Linux box (or, I'll go ahead and say it, a Beowolf Cluster) all without the programmer having to know -- OR CARE!

For that reason alone, IBM's offering seems like "Too Little, Too Late".

Re:WCF -- Salvo against HP "Global Grid Exchange"

[Anonymous Coward]

I know the person who came up with the name for this at IBM - was 1.5 years ago when he first floated the idea within IBM to establish something like this permantely....and also know that this has been in plan/works/development at IBM since that start of 2004..

So good theory, but wrong. Also I notcied you can't do anything with HP announcement...coming soon is very boring.

You forgot some apostrophe's

[Anonymous Coward]

Any distributed software needs to have the following requirement's for me to install it on my system:

- protected against buffer overflow's etc. (managed code)
- signed updates of grid software, grid client software and working package's
- only for use for non-profit organization's
- and I w'an't to choose my project's

With the current incarnations of ****CPU's****, there is power usage as well. Maybe there is a client where you can set power safe feature's as well?

NT kernel (and up) has thread prioritisation

[aegilops]

Firstly, I have to agree totally with it being a poor show about a lack of Linux or UNIX clients. My lowly OpenBSD box could be chugging away 24x7: other posters have made similar references to non-Windows kit they could use that is actually of significant value (unlike mine). No argument there.

I just downloaded the agent myself on a WinXP box, and the default install is *NOT* to run as a screensaver. The NT kernel (and 2K, XP etc) supports thread prioritisation, so this process is chugging away right now with the default priority set to Low. You can see this from Task Manager by selecting View, Select Columns, Base Priority. While composing this post I have chugged through 4% of a batch, for what it's worth.

Incidentally, the client is a re-skin and tarting up of the old UD client, as used a few years back for the University of Oxford cancer research project. What's interesting is that back then, UD was getting paid for building the massively distributed client. That in itself is not inherently bad as such, but was worth knowing at the time. I'd expect the same this time 'round, too.

Cheers

Aegilops

Re:NT kernel (and up) has thread prioritisation

[Almost-Retired]

So there has been some public input to how it runs then. Great. But who is UD?

I figured this stuff was probably written more to scratch an itch than for money, which does put it into a slightly dimmer light IMO.

I've not attempted to convert to the BOINC project yet, again it seems that a linux client is something they only do when all the other projects for winderz are caught up. Sad, really.

CHeers, Gene

this seems like a joke aplication

[Anonymous Coward]

has anyone goten hold of the source codes for this?

i tryed looking on there poorly writen site, but all there is , is that damned ".exe" .. .. its really just diging a hole for them, theres no online registration , so you cant post in there forums unless you have installed the software, and for that you need a "minimium" requirement of windows ( yea right .. another lie right there, windows is not a minimium requirement, or they would have a UNIX version, as all OS's that are both popular and supier are UNIX-like ) .. windows is the maxium requirement

and there lisience agreement is rather scary .. i may be a bad reader, but it apears they can sue you, and you have no right for a descent defense, and it also implys they are insatlling malware along side the program

i dont see this project doing anything good, if they really are trying to better everyone, the project would be open source, so everyone can use it..... restricting who can use it just makes everyone worser off then before, and prevents people from learning, and cripples civilization .... all this project can do is try to help doctors make people suffer to the day they die, and at best just make them live a bit longer, but they will die, and in the end all this project has done, it yet again withold information from everyone

Social problems?

[mrogers]

Seems to me the relevant "social problem" here is that people don't switch their damn computers off. How much power is sucked up globally by office computers left on overnight? How much CO2 is produced showing screensavers to empty offices? Here's an idea for real humanitarian computing: instead of finding uses for "wasted" clock cycles, get your company to switch off its computers and send the money it saves on electricity to a cancer research charity. Grumble grumble grumble...

Same comment in haiku form for those with short attention spans:

Does your computer
Need to be left on all night?
Pull the f*cking plug

Love IBM

[wifitek]

What more can I say, I Love IBM!
I will back this company up 100%

we dont need more money

[Anonymous Coward]

we need more compassion and human understanding, mostly amongst the rich and powerful (ie you people)

Supercomputers

[CultFigure]

"Despite the stunning power available to this kind of distributed computing, it is less useful than it appears. In my research area (computational biology), the effort of parallelizing an algorithm and collating the results is seldom worth the dividend in speedup. Supercomputers generally run idle at most universities, for this very reason."

Forgive my ignorance, but am I to understand that the time it takes to (re)write a program to distribute certain data across multiple machines (via a supercomputer cluster or worldwide grid) exceeds the benefits of having one program run on a single "fast" machine, or something?

Again, I clearly don't know what I'm talking about, but I am interested in why, for example, a $15 million grant couldn't go towards building a really fast supercomputer - ala Virginia Tech - hire a couple of scientists, a few talented programmers and systems engineers, and still have money to operate the machine for say, a year or two. All the while, a program could be running non-stop on the cluster to help "cure" my co-worker of his Type I diabetes.

Any further insight, web references, etc. would be great!

Re:Supercomputers

[Dioscorea]

Again, I clearly don't know what I'm talking about, but I am interested in why, for example, a $15 million grant couldn't go towards building a really fast supercomputer - ala Virginia Tech - hire a couple of scientists, a few talented programmers and systems engineers

The problem is that hiring the scientists and programmers is typically much harder than building a fast machine. Software is the bottleneck, not hardware.

Get a dictionary!

[mwood]

How exactly does one get from "medical and environmental research" to "complex social problems"?

OTOH I'd like to see a grid take on greed, apathy, irrational hatred, illiteracy/innumeracy/general ignorance, and the like.

Human grids?

[adeyadey]

I had to read that twice..

If you were part of a human distributed computing grid would the postman occasionally deliver a letter saying "when you have some spare time, what is 645 times 821?"