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Grid Computes 420 Years Worth of Data in 4 Months
Da Massive writes with a ComputerWorld article about a grid computing approach to the malaria disease. By running the problem across 5,000 computer for a total of four months, the WISDOM project analyzed some 80,000 drug compounds every hour. The search for new drug compounds is normally a time-intensive process, but the grid approach did the work of 420 years of computation in just 16 weeks. Individuals in over 25 countries participated. " All computers ran open source grid software, gLite, which allowed them to access central grid storage elements which were installed on Linux machines located in several countries worldwide. Besides being collected and saved in storage elements, data was also analyzed separately with meaningful results stored in a relational database. The database was installed on a separate Linux machine, to allow scientists to more easily analyze and select useful compounds." Are there any other 'big picture' problems out there you think would benefit from the grid approach?
The search for new drug compounds is normally a time-intensive process, but the grid approach did the work of 420 years of computation in just 16 weeks.
Cue the stoners in 5, 4, 3, 2....
Wizard Needs Food, Badly
You can kill malaria with poisons/pesticides and by changing the ecosystem, so in this sense it's preventable. Some cancers are preventable (lung cancer), while others not so easily.
It strikes me as strange that something like Wikipedia could not be distributed across user's PCs in more of a peer-to-peer fashion. Surely the web itself could benefit from further decentralisation. This issue bothered me some years ago, when I discovered that my desktop PC at work had about 40Gb of unpartitioned disk space. I often wondered about the sense of running file servers in big organisations, when each user probably has a few tens of gigabytes of unused or unpartitioned disk space. If illicit music and video can be distributed by P2P, why not all information?
If the grid solution finds THE cure for H5N1, will it be patentable? If not, who pays for the R&D to implement it? Who gets the patent? Do the thousands of people who allowed their PCs to be used get anything? Will big drug companies be able to use this and keep the prices low for the final product?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
sorry, i missed that definition. what is that in library of congresses per human hair?
(420 years / 16 weeks) / 5000 computers = 1:4 scalability!!!
Frickin amazing! No one's EVER done that before.
how abouutt a drog thet maks slshdaughters spel gooder and youze gooderest grammer?
"Tu fui, ego eris" - Virgil
Would it be possible to use all that computing power to make an electronic voting machine that works?
Oh wait! How about a voting machine based on "quantum computing"! Then we wouldn't even have to vote, the machine would already know who won.
Goddamn liberal qubits! Bunch of flip-floppers!
Stupid conservative qubits! They think that there is ONE and ONLY ONE answer for everything!
Based on the size of useful data GRID collected from 5,000+ machines and the quantity of pornography on my computer, they are claiming that: porn != useful.
...GRID computing; you disappoint me.
In an amazing breakthrough which will no doubt have profound implications on Moore's Law, it has been discovered that multiple computers can accomplish in a shorter time what would take much longer on a single computer! Researchers will next launch a study to see how much faster 6000 video ipods working simultaneously can play through all the songs on the iTMS compared to a single first generation ipod shuffle.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
But not all lung cancer is preventable. Non smokers can have virus caused cancer in the lungs.
According to:
h tml
http://archive.idrc.ca/books/reports/1996/01-07e.
Malaria kills quite a few people every year so I don't think it's a waste.
~S
Perhaps if enough PCs were put to the task they could create new Shakespearean masterpieces. 64bit Night and all that.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
I don't know - the Mozix cluster at work achieves about the same efficiency... I.T. won't listen that there is something incredibly wrong as I employed as a statistician so obviously know nothing about computers!
:(){
When you consider global warming...malaria WILL become a huge problem for many areas that haven't had to worry about it before now. This is in no way a waste. Buy your quinine now and while you're doing it...buy stock in the companies that manufacture it.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
Up to a full megawatt or more for sixteen weeks. How much does that cost where you live? Still, it's a great bang for the buck. So how long would it take with a beowolf cluster of these?
What?
4/20 is the birthday of Adolf Hitler. Therefore, this is very evil.
Plus, 4+20-1 is 23. ((4*20)-11)/3 is also 23. More proof of it's evilness.
Unfortunately, most of the people killed are considered somewhat "less than" human. It goes a long way to explain the lack of interest, while other diseases are more politically expedient. The profit margins just aren't there.
What?
I'll take a Gin and Tonic (with Quinine, of course).
"Using distributed computing to find molecular cures or the shape a protein will fold into as it comes out of the business end of a ribosome is all well and good, but if you can find a shape on the political map that concentrates all left-wingers into little ghetto-districts and gives solid 55% majorities to right-wingers across all the other ones, and you can deliver this IT solution around the time of the 2010 reapportionment, the Bush Administration has a no-bid contract with your name on it."
Did you have to go to politics with this? We all know that G.W. is a moron and only a shade of intelligence compared to his father. Republicans suck, Democrats suck, and Libertarians don't suck as bad only because they can hardly get elected. The US (and most other countries) are ruled by the few that have the wealth. Corporate welfare rules. No one who can make a difference gives a shit about the environment or global warming and we are all going to hell in hand basket. The ones who do care can't make a difference unless they sell their souls in order to get elected. How the hell does politics come into your equation for this story?
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
you must live in a western nation
(Preface - My research group specializes in parallel computing) There are classes of problems so computationally intensive that the computers that can do them in a reasonable amount of time won't be invented for decades. Almost all of these are simulations of physical reactions (invitro drug simulation, climate simulation, biomolecular engineering sims, physics sims, 'etc). As a general rule, these problems scale weakly (meaning that as you add more computers, you can simulate more datapoints, and get more accurate results). If memory serves, the hardest problem I can recall involved hydrogen fusion simulations, requiring computers 10-1000 times faster than the best in the world today.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
http://www.majestic12.co.uk/
I think that a lot of the world's problems could be solved like this; the downside of course being that some guy in an island would have to sit underground and insert 4 8 15 16 32 43 over and over. (prays someone who kept up with the lost experience read that and understood) ha
That 420 was based on some benchmark. Perhaps a 1GHz Pentium or something. Perhaps the average CPU on the grid was higher.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
You know, I think the thing that aggravates me the most is that these distributed computing systems are helping drug companies find cures to illnesses using OUR processing power and computers WE paid for, only to sell us the drug that they would have been hard pressed to develop without our hardware back to us at an extremely inflated price.
Working on generic PCs using idle CPU, that's probably pretty good, right? These aren't dedicated grid computers as far as I can tell.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
lol.. gerymandering has been around since almost the beginging of politics in the US. Why would the bush administration need what it already has? Besides, they don't partition the political boundries, the states do.
And it seems to be the democrats working to groups all the liberal leftwingers into the same district. Of course this is probably an unintended reaction to keeping people dependent on social programs that hand out instead of help up. You may wonder why an imbecile Like bush won the elections instead of the democrats. After you exhaust all you resources consider this, The one side attempts to place alarge portion of the population into a dependency to keep them loyal to keeping them in power. The other side has been able to show this to get into power. You can figure who fits wich side on your own.
It isn't somewhat less then human. It is not seeing the need to rush and aid someone who lives near danger on purpose. Especialy when the most effective control has been taken off the market because of enviromental concerns.
I mean, would you really think it is most benificial sending food to starving children living in an area incapable of supporting life (like s desert) over moving them to a place that could?
You're glossing over some important points.
1) I'm pretty sure that the servers have to send the same job out to multiple clients. That is, you can't assume that it's sufficient to have only one computer return a result for one job. There's the possibility that the result is incorrect or never returned.
2) The point of grid computing is to reduce both the cost and time required to do the computation. The entire endeavor would be more efficient if you had full control over the entire grid, i.e. a huge cluster. The entire endeavor would also be more expensive. (Last I heard, Sun is having a hard time finding customers for it's grid computing service. It might just be that $1/CPU-hour is too expensive.)
3) Distributed computing of this sort depends on unused CPU cycles. You can't expect 100% CPU utilization out of all 5,000 machines that took part in the project.
So, what you comparing this to arrive at your cynical conclusion?
Did you consider the difference in cost?
The development of models to find relationships among individuals based upon their phone records, email communications, webpage preferences and other easily recorded and identified identifying tidbits of digital transactional receipts. Of course, I'm sure that there are various three letter agencies already well ahead of me on that one. (High guys!)
I, ah, though quinine cured malaria...?
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
Worse...
It's over 4 months, not a fraction of a second.
If I have a task that takes 100 seconds to run and I want it completed in under a second, scalability becomes a challenge... I have to figure out how to break it in to at least 100 distinct parts and deal with all of the communication lags associated. To have any kind of fault tolerance, I probably want to break it in to at least 1,000 tasks so that if one processor is running fast, it can get fed more and if one processor corrupts its process, I don't find out right at the end of the second, with no room to compensate, that I have to run re-run that full second's worth of processing elsewhere to make up for it. That's where the challenge comes in.
If I have a task that takes 100 seconds to run and all I'm trying to do is run it a lot of times over a period of time that's many times greater, I can run it 864 times a day per system with absolutely no scalability issues whatsoever and simply send the relatively small complete result sets back. With 100 systems, if each one can run a distinct task from start to finish, I'd be expecting pretty much dead on 100 times the total number crunching as there are absolutely no issues with task division, synchronization or network lag.
In this case, they ran 5,000 computers over 4 months. Assuming a single task is solvable in under 4 months by a single system, they should have had no difficult task division problems to solve, absolutely minimal synchronization issues and next to no lag issues to address. In short, even a pretty inefficient programmer should be able to approach 1:1 scalability in that easy of a scenario.
Efficiency of algorithms is a challenge when you want a single result fast. When you want many results and are prepared to wait so long as you're getting very many of them, that's an incredibly easy distributed computing problem.
I've been donating my processor time for quite awhile now for the Malaria research, and even though the drug companies will probably benefit from my donation, they would not have these breakthroughs if people didn't donate that time, and it is the fact that a breakthrough will be found is what keeps me donating my processor time. It's a great feeling knowing that I've contributed to a possible cure towards this disease! Other projects that could need the services of Grid Computing, I believe that was the original question that was put forth, are imaging analysis (any field), physics (particle research, etc), and I can also see Grid Computing being used also for computer animations where the time to render animations would be greatly reduced, and allowing movies, and shows to be released much faster than before. (With this application, it would be known that you are contributing to a product that a company will be making a profit, and the only reason to do it is get these movies, shows to market faster. I, for one, would love to see a sequel to The Incredibles, and to be a part of that would be fantastic, even to just have my name mentioned in the credits!) One thing that needs to be done for these projects to get the maximum exposure for Grid Computing is to dumb down the process. A Noob would be hard pressed to set up Boinc Manager to do the Malaria research.
Much of this discussion is totally misdirected because the writers are confusing a distributed computing project like SETI or BOINC - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOINC_client-server_t echnology - with a grid system - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing. They are completely different things.
Actually I'm sure they would love to move to more fertile, profitable areas. Unfortunately, there are others with a different agenda who like to keep them away. Those people are getting much more outside help than the starving kids. Let's not forget the economics of the arms trade with african warlords and corrupt tinpot generals who are, of course, "good for our interests". I'm also aware that basic sanitation and clean water, both cheap and easy to achieve with the right thinking, will take care of probably a full 90% of the problem. Their old traditions are responsible for much of it. The parent's link lead me to this. It has to be just the tip of the iceberg. So the chemical insecticides are not needed. There are far too many unexplored, easily accessable natural solutions.
Outsiders really aren't interested in Africa's problems, unless it interferes with "free trade". This will be solved by the Africans with relatively little outside help. It's just the usual numbers game.
I've heard that gin is a good mosquito repellent.
What?
Gus Gorman has a patant on this already called the Ultimate Computer, I believe it's in the Grand Canyon.
It did 4 months worth of computation in 4 months. If it had been 420 years worth of computation it would have taken 420 years. It's like infomercials that say "and you get all this, a $899 value, for $30!" Obviously it's not "a $899 value" or you would be selling it for that instead of $30. Perhaps, though, they mean that they did 420 processor-years of work over the course of 4 months (meaning that they would have had an average of 1260 cores doing something useful at any time).
or just 420 years worth of junk data ?
I imagined a beowulf cluster of those, nekked and petrified. Then I got ashamed of myself for rehashing the old meme and dumped hot grits in my pants. As I was convulsing on the ground, there was only one thought left in my mind:
"Does it run Linux?"
sorry... nothing to contribute today but my name {thats what alcohol does... if i was (just) stoned, i would have a few pages to contribute}....damn alcohol....
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
After a little poking around, I found what looks like the stuff they put on the nets. It was under their noses all along. And I would venture to think that the they (the Africans) have known about it for a very long time. I'm too lazy to find out how well it controls these guys, something even more neglected in mass media. Nature triumphs the computer again. Okay, now I'm drifting off topic, but it at least I did it seamlessly and gracefully :-)
What?
Grid computing is ill-defined, but it is about distributed processing, as is BOINC. BOINC (which now powers SETI@home) is a potential component or subset of what is now considered to be Grid. Some similar systems preexisted the current work on Grid, e.g. Condor, but then the Grid concept was first referenced at the end of the 1960s. Grid now adds concepts such as services (again not a new idea), and also workflows (again not new) and also work on data distribution.
The work that was done under WISDOM was unlike SETI@home in that it was distributing work to clusters (e.g. GridPP machines) rather than individual machines using gLite from EGEE, with local job managers then taking the work to the individual machines. SETI@home uses BOINC as the end-to-end work distribution system. Reading between the lines the Storage Request Broker (SRB) was probably used to control data access.
So actually it is just 4 months of data with the new standard they set.
This may be a bit obvious to all you /.rs ... but what the hell...
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/
SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.
Well, My piont was that nobody in their right minds think that some people are less then human. They just don't jump at a cause to help them because of various reasons. You pointed out a few good ones too.
As for waiting untill it effects free trade. It is normal for a person to not care much about situations that don't effect them. This isn't anything new or novel. It might not be the best practice to have but it is a reality in life. I really don't see much wrong with it other then it tends to lend the opinion that if you don't think your being heard do something to effect something they care about. But even this is a trivial concern. Most humans get this idea from their parrents who ground them from nitendo or something they think you like to punish you.
Personaly, I have enough troubles running my own life without having to concern myself with someone across an entire ocean that doesn't influence my life at all. And when malaria does effect my life, you bet your bottom dollar that I would use anything to stop it even if it was bad for the enviroment. Why, Because it is that easy to control and rid the risk of it.
If the headline were "NEW MALARIA DRUGS FOUND WITH AID OF GRID COMPUTING" I would be much more impressed.
It's all well and good to tie a big grid to a problem, but if you don't ask the right questions, you won't get useful answers.
Are there any significant grid computing success stories?
-pvh
"The wise man proportions his belief to the evidence." -- David Hume
quinine cures malaria strains not yet resistant to quinine.
Your work computer can be managed by the company you work at; they can even revoke root if they're concerned about security. There are actually a few existing distributed filesystems for Linux, though most of them suck, and the few I've seen with the potential not to suck either cost money or are a long way from being stable on Linux. Haven't seen ANY of these on Windows.
Someone mentioned backup, which isn't a big deal. Ever heard of RAID? Yeah, it could be something like that.
Although if it's a desktop PC, the 40 gigs probably isn't worth the power required to keep your computer on, and they're probably better with insanely aggressive local stores to speed up disk access. But again, these kind of suck for Linux.
The closest thing to a solid, clean design that I can find for Linux network filesystems is NFS, and that doesn't have any of the features we're talking about -- not without combining it with one of these other kludges...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Are there any other 'big picture' problems out there you think would benefit from the grid approach?
I can think of two:
this
...and this.
Hey, this stuff kills all kinds of insects... Won't somebody think of the larvae?
A witty saying proves nothing. Voltaire (1694-1778)
Which is, according to all evidence and experience, a most... intriguing problem to a male consciousness. Now that there is the technology available, we should _FINALLY_ take advantage of it and find out about the secret inner workings of this giant enigma! Go grid computing! - Michael
Why should I volunteer my time and money to subsidize some company when they will make millions(billions) of dollars a year?
Do you volunteer for google? Microsoft? or Target for 4 month without pay?
My tax payers money already go to NIH which subsidizes all the drug development research in the world. What do I get out of it? 40 dollars per tablet medicine?
Fuck this. They want my work, they will pay me. They want 5000 computers, I will set up the servers, they will pay my workers and my company money. End of the story. This is no fucking communism where all the workers work for peanuts and scum bags daughters fucking fly on super sonic jets from moscow to paris so she can fucking buy perfume.
Fuck this project, fuck it with a blunt spoon.
2. Most starving children don't live in places as hostile as deserts.
3. Where would you like to move them? How many tens of millions of refugees would you like to support in your home country, give land to, find jobs for, and so on? If it's not a majority, which other countries would you prefer take on the task of relocating entire nations?
4. In short, have you considered the social, political, and economic implications of a mass relocation project?
You're a troll. But for the record millions of people have malaria right now, there aren't easy cures especially for certain strains and the economic toll is huge.
Yes, I'm concerned about global warming too. But I think you're off base about malaria. Sure, there is a chance that malaria will be more prevalent. However, I think our real resources should be put to combating the animal predators from the North who will want to eat us for lunch.
First, when global warming happens, all the polar bears will come South looking for something to eat. We are probably on the top of their list. First, the bears will be real angry at us because we melted their front yard. And secondly, we happen to be the fattest creatures around--there is a lot of meat on our bones. And don't even get me started on what will happen to our shrubbery when the reindeer head this way.
I think instead of wasting CPU cycles on malaria, we instead should be using those computing resources searching for a safe but effective polar bear repellent. That way we have our priorities straight. Just my 2 cents.
It's called information assurance. There are reasons that a Netapp/EMC array costs $25,000 per terabyte when a 1TB maxtor usb drive costs less than $1000. The first is that it is made to tolerate faults and be redundant. Sure you could do this in an enterprise, but then you end up with massive duplication to get around people turning off their computers, a massively expensive and complex distribution and tracking system, and higher failure and lower performance of desktop drives that are now running your webserver and processing an access DB for the local user. The second is speed. Data IO has always been my limiting factor. Working with any kind of media, large databases, etc, speed is king. Not only are desktop drives single channel and slower (RPMs), but they are now seperated over a network that may already be flooded. Information assurance isn't cheap, but it's worth it.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Kinda like the what the mice were doing, before earth was destroyed by the vogons...
"In this case, they ran 5,000 computers over 4 months. Assuming a single task is solvable in under 4 months by a single system, they should have had no difficult task division problems to solve, absolutely minimal synchronization issues and next to no lag issues to address. In short, even a pretty inefficient programmer should be able to approach 1:1 scalability in that easy of a scenario."
Here you are confusing CPU time with wall clock time. The task may have taken 4 months of wall clock time, but what proportion of those machines' time was running the WISDOM tasks? Given that the UK machines were from the GridPP project I would guess that the machines were only running the jobs part of the time, and in fact the article notes that this was the case. So the scalability issue (or this part of it) is a red herring as what the analysis actually showed was that using CPU resources that would otherwise have gone unused led to the job being run in 4 months (granted the electricity cost is not zero, though). Actually given how heavily loaded many clusters are in the UK I am surprised it didn't take longer than 4 months (as that implies only 75% cluster load from other jobs, whereas 90% is often more typical).
the question is, were they 5,000 GRID computers?? like these? heheh
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
No, no, no - you are talking about 4 months when using CPU resources not otherwise being used by other things on clusters with another primary purpose. What you are complaining about is like admonishing someone who says they spent 72 hours building a model kit for not having started it on Monday and finished the the last moment of Wednesday.
420 years huh.... niiiiiiiice
Mars global orbiter has sent back high resolution pictures of the surface that would take scientists a few years to scan to find definitive signs of water on Mars. This would be a perfect candidate for such a system.
no one's ever done anything like this before.
this really is news!
Malaria would be a forgotten disease if the ecopagans hadn't outlawed DDT.
Tens of millions of human beings [typically brown & black, and suffering in the most politically correct of third world cesspools] die every year because of our arrogant and narcissistic obsession with this pagan religion.
There have been lots of responses already, but I would like to add another...
There seems to be a widespread fallacy that all human resources should be applied to the One Biggest Problem facing humanity at any given moment. Overlooking for a moment the obvious problems inherent in trying to choose the One Biggest Problem, and assuming we could actually rank all human problems in a well-defined order, there are still two huge problems with this approach:
1. Diminishing returns. Putting twice as many people on a problem doesn't solve it twice as quickly. The extra people could well be more productive working on a separate problem. This is the well-known fallacy of the Mythical Man-Month.
2. Misplaced priorities. The majority of people in the world do not have cancer. If all the resources of humanity were spent on cancer, where would that leave the rest of us that don't have cancer? "Sorry, we've stopped making antibiotics, insulin, toothpaste, books, and clothing so we can focus on fighting cancer."
In addition, there's an implicit assumption in the parent poster's position that the researchers who are looking for a cure for malaria have been wasting their time. I'd like to ask, what has *he* been doing during this time? I hope he has been looking for a cancer cure, or else he's nothing but a hypocrite.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
It's worth mentioning that malaria was nearly wiped out by the simple and inexpensive use of DDT before Rachel Carson and her sympathizers managed to get the stuff banned. And 35 years later, pretty much all her arguments have been shown to have been fabricated. But hey, only 30 million+ died as a result.
It's nice to know that grid computing can be used to evaluate the potential of all those compounds, of course, as there are certainly applications for that. But the context of the current test is one that we should be ashamed is necessary.
--- Bill
...is "Grid computing finds cure for malaria."
I could look through the threads of my bedroom rug for 420 years and not find the cure either.
Eyes on the prize, people.
Since the work took 4 months, it implies that each machine was used for about 25% of capacity. Now, the big point would be that they got the work done for free other than overhead costs (creating the grid software and networking, etc.). Which ain't bad.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Can Entropy be reversed?
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
Are there any other 'big picture' problems out there you think would benefit from the grid approach?
;p
How about "Global warming: Are humans affecting the enviroment on Earth"?
I don't think 5k computers can solve it, better increase the numbers tenfold or more.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
+5 Insightful, you clueless tools.
With a botnet of a few hundred thousand machines, brute-forcing the crypto application of your choice would immediately come to mind. Whether that would be one of the better uses of the botnet is questionable, but hey, if you have something that's really important to you to try to crack...
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Another grid computing project is the World Community Grid. Members have contributed over 75,000 CPU years to several projects. See the http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/.
The last time I checked there were over 260,000 members. Over 100,000 have joined a team. There is a slashdotusers team (one of the larger teams) as well as the one I am in UserFriendly.Org.
"...Are there any other 'big picture' problems out there you think would benefit from the grid approach?..."
One of today's greatest problems facing all humanity is Gravity. Use the Grid to solve Anti-Gravity.
In short,
In a lot of situations, the problem isn't that the land won't support the life living on it, it is more like the life living on it has outnumbered the ability for the land to support it. Takig only a portion of the people away can have a drastic impact on it's ability to be productive and self supportive of those living there. Shipping in food at the expense of others isn't fixing this problem, it is making the people dependent on others. And when something happens to stop the supply of food comming in, it will devestate them.
Worrying about the environment is a luxury. Being able to do something to stop what will probably kill you is a luxury. Living anywhere because you want to is a luxury. Having a choice to take the lucid dream inducing malaria drugs or not is a luxury.
Where malaria flourishes, luxuries are scarce.
Travel as much as you can in your life, preferably to the poorer countries. They are often the happier ones.
Sometimes, you can, you go to hell for the rest of your life! That's a true thing.
You and Stalin would have gotten along just fine, I think. In a lot of situations, the problem isn't that the land won't support the life living on it, it is more like the life living on it has outnumbered the ability for the land to support it. It is rarely the case that starvation is due to an intrinsic inability of land to support its population. It has more to do with an economy that can't support modern practices of agriculture and distribution of goods, dictators that don't support their people, and so on.
Nope, FOlding@home and the article are talking about he same thing.
:)
We do over 420 years of compute time ever day tho
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
I already have had this thread modded as flaim and troll for no good reason other then destroying someone's opinion that people think some others are less then human because they don't jump in and help at the first sighn of anything. So i don't mind screwing around with the ideas of how am I supposed to be conected on a way that obligates me to an action and If they are happier and suffering, it seems that their choices have caused the dangers to be present so again, how dows their choices obligate me to anything. Is it because i made other choices and flurish as apposed to their more empoverish but happier life?
This sort of stuff is part of my job. Full disclosure: I am a molecular modeler at a large pharmaceutical company. People always want this method to work, and it seldom does. Why? The models are too primitive, automated data analysis will miss true hits, signal to noise ratio is very high. First of all, what they are looking for is properly termed a hit, not a drug. The odds of a drug (i.e. the final chemical entity that gets FDA approval) coming out of this type of screen is beyond astronomic.
Secondly you need to understand what they're actually doing. They have a rigid model of a receptor/enzyme/protein that is relevant to malaria. Then they dock what's called a library of compounds into that receptor and compute a score based on various interactions and/or properties. Almost surely explicit solvent is not taken into account, amongs a host of other simplifications. Probably then they will have to use some kind of cut off. What will that be? Well it depends on the actual number of compounds they can test in a real assay. If it was this easy, don't you think there'd be way more drugs out there, and development wouldn't cost millions of dollars? Trust me, I see these kinds of kooky proposals all the time, and while I wish them the best, I don't hold out too much hope.
An experiment I've done myself: compare the results of an experimental high throughput screen on 1.5M compounds against a virtual screen (very much analogous to what was run here). Result: 1% overlap of the top 20% of compounds from either screen. Shouldn't the model be able to reproduce reality better?
This kind of method can work in limited cases and with much smaller numbers of compounds. Brute force rarely does.
And I believe I addressed that when I made the statement of them being subject to poor choices of their government and parrents.
Then the definition isn't being applied properly. I have seen the report of starving kids going to bed hungery and then you find out that they are getting enough nutrition just not enough food to have a snack before going to bed or to gain 20 pounds in a week. This isn't a definition of starving but they are being presented that way.
Most prefereble in there back yard. And then to the back yards of the closest place that resembles their climate and political/geographical reagons. Then spread out from there. If it happens to be my back yard then be it.
Lol.. You act like that cannot be done. And there being enough jobs is something that will need to be looked at when the movment is happening. And a non zero unemployment rate is normal. There won't be everyone willing to work so there will always be unemployment of some sorts.
Quite simple, they will end up with any jobs they are qualified to have and that there is an opening for. Most immigrants in american enjoy equal access to the jobs regular citizens do. Some aren't allowed to work or only allowed to work in certain areas because of their VISA limitations. Barring that, If they speak the language there is no limits outside the normal limits placed in regular citizens.
And what about the ate of the mexican immigrants in the US. The illegal ones do shit jobs that don't pay but hat is because as illegal aliens they don't have the same amounts of recourse a citizen does. If your considering this as immigration then your holding the results of illegal actions as the common asumtion of everyone moving to the country. That is wrong.
As for the muslims in france, lol.. This is more because of how france is run then how immigrants are treated. France has a huge unemployment problem that they aren't likley to fix any time soon. Also, the antage goes, when in rome, do as the romans do. It doesn't aper to be the situation here. I mean bringing the violence in with them doesn't make for a supportive and welcoming society when your moving into it. And lets face it, burning cars and destroying businesses is somethign that the US went though and came out ok. So if anything it will just be a matter of time. But they need to fix some things first that have nothing to do with how immigrants are treated.
If they don't want to move
Brain: "Pinky, tonight we will take over the world!"
That sounds like a good one!
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
420 years of computing.. hmm I wonder where they pulled that number from....
What drugs did they say they where "researching?"
Heh, don't be so quick to dismiss the thought :-) Something much worse could arise from the ashes, so to speak.
What?
Sorry 'bout the mods. Don't take this wrongly, ok? But what you seem to reflect is very common thinking still. I believe we need to realize there is no other side of the planet anymore. Everything is just around the corner now. We leave a piece of ourselves everywhere we go and we always bring something back. The differences amongst us will dissolve over time. Let's embrace it. Jeeze, I hope that doesn't become a poor excuse of an ad campaign for Burger King or Gap Jeans to take over the whole world now
What?
Shipping in food at the expense of others isn't fixing this problem, it is making the people dependent on others.
Very much the intentions of the overseas (for them) merchants. I believe they would be quite self sufficient...if so much of the money simply wasn't being stolen.
Now...Back to the subject at hand. I would use the computers to figure out the next World Series win for the Cubs. Whaddya think? Do we have enough power on the grid? Or will it just cause another Northeast blackout?
What?
You know. I don't think the mods are your fault or anything. There is no need o appoligize. I should have known that replying to such a charged statment was a setup in the first place. But It had to happen because nobody in their right mind thinks that some people are less then human. It can be explained away far easier without malice being injected.
But as to what your saying. I don't dissagree at all. But I really don't think it is as much about the differences in "us" as to how someone gets motivated. They usualy don't think twice about something that doesn't effect them in some way. Soon everything will have an impact on everyone and it will make them at least think about it. But when push comes ot shove, More people will be worried about themselves and their families then someone else.
And this self centerness Isn't something that comes lightly. Growing up in the hight of the cold war, we were often instructed to think about "what if" and "how we would survive" a nuclear attack. Often these plans consisted of a fallout shelter somewhere that could only support so many people for so long of a time. We came to grips that we would have to exclude others. My family had/has a underground shelter that originaly would hold 3 families of 5 for 3 weeks. Unfortunatly I am not in that group anymore because I'm the only sibbling that doesn't have kids. I think they counted two kis as one adult so that why there wasn't a strict number of people. The plan was to goto it in case of emergency but we knew if it was to late we couldn't go in or risk killing everyone else. Decisions like this don't come easy but it takes away some of the sadness when thinking of everyone else. It is a sad reality that we accepted. And when the Y2k didn't hit, we still had a plan for it. Now we have terrorist and the though to biological or chemical warfare and there is still a need to think about this.
Again, I don't think it has anything to do with a difference in culture, race, language, or anything else. I think it is just how we were conditioned to ultimatly think about our own survival before considering someone elses. And when we see how enabling something to happen at the expense of others goes on in our own back yard, We aren't goiong to be as motivated to do so in someone elses. And yes, I'm talking about the welfare state that pays if you have kids but disproportionatly stops when you get a job. But thats getting into another subject.
But It had to happen because nobody in their right mind thinks that some people are less then human.
:-) History has shown more than one or two maniacs that were in briefly in charge of things. And yes there is plenty of talk of "barbarians" and "savages" to this day. Anyway the real issue is purely economic. The subject of humanity doesn't come up in the boardroom.
Who said the people running the world are in their right mind?
What?
That much computing power could drastically cut the amount of time needed to brute force private keys, so why not leverage it to break the DRM keys used to encrypt the new music/videos/etc?
the subhuman thread is irrelevant.
Honestly, 'your problem'? No, you're not involved, it has nothing to do with you, and so it's not your problem. But the least you could do is be supportive of general human wellfare around the world. Nothing wrong with offering a voice of support so that those who can might be more willing to help.
As far as your and their 'choices,' neither you nor most of them have anything at all to do with the cultural and social constructs. Most people in SE Asia never made any choices at all about the French and the British coming in in the 17 and 1800s, and very few of them had anything to say in the agricultural projects. Finally, they have little to say about their ancestry, cultural norms and customs. Choice requires opportunity, which doesn't always exist.
Sometimes, you can, you go to hell for the rest of your life! That's a true thing.
Grid computing, or other technologies which provide for synergies, may help cure maladies such as the common cold, HIV, global warming,
cancer, etc. Why not? Better hurry, as bush will be bombing Tehran by the end of April....
I lived in a desert for the first seventeen years of my life (Phoenix, Arizona) and last I checked it was capable of supporting life.
Le français vous intéresse?
Somehow these "solutions" don't seem as preferable when it's you who has to bear the burden. And don't even try to claim that there is unlimited free land for refugees to buy with the cushy new jobs they'll be able to get. Lol.. You act like that cannot be done. And there being enough jobs is something that will need to be looked at when the movment is happening. I don't know which is more appalling, your economics or your politics. No, the free market will not magically create as many jobs as there are people who need them. The illegal ones do shit jobs that don't pay but hat is because as illegal aliens they don't have the same amounts of recourse a citizen does. I assure you, if we had as many legal immigrants as there are illegal immigrants, they wouldn't be getting jobs as good as the current average citizen's, particularly if we don't get to pick the ones with the best educations but have to take anybody who needs to be relocated. This is more because of how france is run then how immigrants are treated. Yeah, as if other countries treat immigrants equally. I hope you are not going to claim that America has.
If you dump tons of new immigrants into any country over a relatively short period of time, you will have social unrest and incomplete assimilation. It's easy to see this in America's own past, and that's when America was relatively eager to accept new immigrants. Which countries do you think are going to be eager to accept large new populations from random, say, African nations? Certainly not other African nations. If they don't want to move, then let them suffer whatever the problems are. It is that simple. Like I said, a very Stalinist viewpoint. The social consequences of depopulating entire nations are far worse to both them and to the other nations purportedly resettling them, which is why nobody has been stupid enough to try your plan. But suggesting that others are somehow obligated to support them because they didn't make a sound decision is bullshit. Moving to another country is not always the "sound decision" you think it is, and it is far less expensive to support nations as-is than try to eradicate them in a diaspora and re-establish their people inside other countries. So, How does my ability to get along with someone effect anything in discusion here? It means that you have a Stalinist viewpoint towards population control, and we all saw how well that worked out. Stalin too tried to redistribute the population within his own country, to poor effect. And you think living there in those condition is a good idea? It's better than your idea, which is economically, politically, socially, and ethically completely unworkable.
I stand behind my assertion that the project described in the article about "420 years of computing" is not running on the same kind of system that folding at home is running on. The two wikipedia links are fairly clear and the system described in the original article is not the same as that used by folding at home. Gil
There's been a lot of talk that the "WWW" may become the "GGG", the Great Global Grid, and I think it might actually happen. The network will absorb not just the information, but the computing power too...