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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."
But isn't the Stanford Folding project already doing part of this?
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
I bet they find a lot caused by viruses.
That's already been done, by pr0n.
Where's distributed.net? Oh yeah, and some Linux clients might be nice.
This way to the egress...
Proteins do.
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.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
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!
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.
I'd encourage all of you guys to support BOINC, an open source and multi-platform architecture instead.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
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.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
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)
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...)
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
my geeklog
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.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere