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?

Comments

Wikipedia?

[JonathanR]

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?

Ok, how does this apply to patents?

[zappepcs]

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?

Re:Ok, how does this apply to patents?

[Dr. Spork]

These are all good questions, and every user who volunteers their computer for something like this should find answers to them. I'm quite sure that the stuff discovered by distributed networks does not automatically enter the public domain, but in cases like SETI and protein folding, the organizers explicitly state that it will. But it wouldn't be illegal for a drug company to use volunteers' computers just for corporate profit. You have to judge the merit of each of these projects on a case-by-case basis. Remember also that there is a cost to participating: you have to run your computer at peak power, and this will add several hundred dollars to your utility bills each year while polluting the planet with extra coal smoke and CO2.

How about open source, distributed search

[classh_2005]

This looks interesting:

http://www.majestic12.co.uk/

Re:Malaria?

[Praseodymn]

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.