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Grid Computes 420 Years Worth of Data in 4 Months

Posted by Zonk on from the that-is-a-lot-of-nerd-hours dept.

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?

4 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. Malaria? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    This seems like a waste of computing resources to me. How many people do you know with malaria? Cancer is far more prevelant.

  2. gnaa by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    join teh gnaa if u r tootaly a winrar

  3. Gerrymandering by Teresita · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Are there any other 'big picture' problems out there you think would benefit from the grid approach?

    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.

  4. I think by ryepnt · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    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