Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

IBM Sponsors Humanitarian Grid Computing Project

Posted by michael on from the many-stones-can-form-an-arch-singly-none-singly-none dept.

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."

6 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. Forgive my ignorance... by NecroPuppy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Forgive my ignorance... by Xeo+024 · · Score: 5, Informative
      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?

    2. Re:Forgive my ignorance... by DeepStream · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. Trying to find diseases by using WinXX computers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I bet they find a lot caused by viruses.

  3. Not all projects are truly humanitarian by Magickcat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Because IBM are control freaks? by Dioscorea · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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...)