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

Excellent

[President_Camacho]

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....

Re:Here's one

[iminplaya]

Then we wouldn't even have to vote, the machine would already know who won.

That's a no-go. Reading the result will change them. Kinda like what happened in Florida :-) Proof that you can do quantum processing with pencil and paper without all these electronical contraptions.