WCG: An Overview
WCG tells us: “World Community Grid brings people together from across the globe to create the largest non-profit computing grid benefiting humanity. It does this by pooling surplus computer processing power. We believe that innovation combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism can help make the planet smarter. Our success depends on like-minded individuals – like you.”
“We are now partnering with People for a Smarter Planet, a collective of communities that let you make a personal difference in solving some of the world’s toughest challenges. Please show your support by clicking the Like button on their Facebook page.
World Community Grid operates under the watchful eye and with the financial support of IBM Corporation.
Here is what IBM says: “Our World Community Grid initiative utilizes grid computing technology to harness the tremendous power of idle computers to perform specific computations related to critical research around complex biological, environmental and health-related issues. The current projects include Help Fight Childhood Cancer, Clean Energy, and Nutritious Rice for the World, FightAIDS@Home, Help Conquer Cancer, AfricanClimate@Home, and a genomics initiative and research on Dengue Fever.
Lets look at some of these projects. All of the text for each project comes from the project’s page at WCG.
“Mission
The mission of Computing for Clean Water is to provide deeper insight on the molecular scale into the origins of the efficient flow of water through a novel class of filter materials. This insight will in turn guide future development of low-cost and more efficient water filters.
Significance
Lack of access to clean water is one of the major humanitarian challenges for many regions in the developing world. It is estimated that 1.2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and 2.6 billion have little or no sanitation. Millions of people die annually – estimates are 3,900 children a day – from the results of diseases transmitted through unsafe water, in particular diarrhea.
Technologies for filtering dirty water exist, but are generally quite expensive. Desalination of sea water, a potentially abundant source of drinking water, is similarly limited by filtering costs. Therefore, new approaches to efficient water filtering are a subject of intense research. Carbon nanotubes, stacked in arrays so that water must pass through the length of the tubes, represent a new approach to filtering water.”
This projects partners with CNMM, the Center for Nano and Micro Mechanics at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China
“Mission
The mission of The Clean Energy Project is to find new materials for the next generation of solar cells and later, energy storage devices. By harnessing the immense power of World Community Grid, researchers can calculate the electronic properties of hundreds of thousands of organic materials – thousands of times more than could ever be tested in a lab – and determine which candidates are most promising for developing affordable solar energy technology.
Significance
We are living in the Age of Energy. The fossil fuel based economy of the present must give way to the renewable energy based economy of the future, but getting there is one of the greatest challenge humanity faces. Chemistry can help meet this challenge by discovering new materials that efficiently harvest solar radiation, store energy for later use, and reconvert the stored energy when needed.
The Clean Energy Project uses computational chemistry and the willingness of people to help look for the best molecules possible for: organic photovoltaics to provide inexpensive solar cells, polymers for the membranes used in fuel cells for electricity generation, and how best to assemble the molecules to make those devices. By helping search combinatorially among thousands of potential systems, World Community Grid volunteers are contributing to this effort.”
Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together
“Mission
The mission of Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together – Phase 2 is to identify promising drug candidates to combat the Dengue, Hepatitis C, West Nile, Yellow Fever, and other related viruses. The extensive computing power of World Community Grid will be used to complete the structure-based drug discovery calculations required to identify these drug candidates.
Significance
This project will discover promising drug candidates that stop the replication of viruses within the Flaviviridae family. Members of this family, including dengue, hepatitis C, West Nile, and yellow fever viruses, pose significant health threats throughout the developed and developing world. More than 40% of the world’s population is at risk for infection by dengue virus. Annually, ~1.5 million people are treated for dengue fever and dengue hemorrhagic fever. Hepatitis C virus has infected ~2% of the world’s population. Yellow fever and West Nile viruses also have had significant global impact. Unfortunately, there are no drugs that effectively treat these diseases. Consequently, the supportive care necessary to treat these infections and minimize mortality severely strains already burdened health facilities throughout the world. The discovery of both broad-spectrum and specific antiviral drugs is expected to significantly improve global health.”
“Mission
The mission of Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together – Phase 2 is to identify promising drug candidates to combat the Dengue, Hepatitis C, West Nile, Yellow Fever, and other related viruses. The extensive computing power of World Community Grid will be used to complete the structure-based drug discovery calculations required to identify these drug candidates.
Significance
This project will discover promising drug candidates that stop the replication of viruses within the Flaviviridae family. Members of this family, including dengue, hepatitis C, West Nile, and yellow fever viruses, pose significant health threats throughout the developed and developing world. More than 40% of the world’s population is at risk for infection by dengue virus. Annually, ~1.5 million people are treated for dengue fever and dengue hemorrhagic fever. Hepatitis C virus has infected ~2% of the world’s population. Yellow fever and West Nile viruses also have had significant global impact. Unfortunately, there are no drugs that effectively treat these diseases. Consequently, the supportive care necessary to treat these infections and minimize mortality severely strains already burdened health facilities throughout the world. The discovery of both broad-spectrum and specific antiviral drugs is expected to significantly improve global health.”
“Mission
The mission of Help Conquer Cancer is to improve the results of protein X-ray crystallography, which helps researchers not only annotate unknown parts of the human proteome, but importantly improves their understanding of cancer initiation, progression and treatment.
Significance
In order to significantly impact the understanding of cancer and its treatment, novel therapeutic approaches capable of targeting metastatic disease (or cancers spreading to other parts of the body) must not only be discovered, but also diagnostic markers (or indicators of the disease), which can detect early stage disease, must be identified.
Researchers have been able to make important discoveries when studying multiple human cancers, even when they have limited or no information at all about the involved proteins. However, to better understand and treat cancer, it is important for scientists to discover novel proteins involved in cancer, and their structure and function.
Scientists are especially interested in proteins that may have a functional relationship with cancer. These are proteins that are either over-expressed or repressed in cancers, or proteins that have been modified or mutated in ways that result in structural changes to them.
Improving X-ray crystallography will enable researchers to determine the structure of many cancer-related proteins faster. This will lead to improving our understanding of the function of these proteins and enable potential pharmaceutical interventions to treat this deadly disease.”
“Human Proteome Folding Phase 2 (HPF2) continues where the first phase left off. The two main objectives of the project are to: 1) obtain higher resolution structures for specific human proteins and pathogen proteins and 2) further explore the limits of protein structure prediction by further developing Rosetta software structure prediction. Thus, the project will address two very important parallel imperatives, one biological and one biophysical.
The project, which began at the Institute for Systems Biology and now continues at New York University’s Department of Biology and Computer Science, will refine, using the Rosetta software in a mode that accounts for greater atomic detail, the structures resulting from the first phase of the project. The goal of the first phase was to understand protein function. The goal of the second phase is to increase the resolution of the predictions for a select subset of human proteins. Better resolution is important for a number of applications, including but not limited to virtual screening of drug targets with docking procedures and protein design. By running a handful of well-studied proteins on World Community Grid (like proteins from yeast), the second phase also will serve to improve the understanding of the physics of protein structure and advance the state-of-the-art in protein structure prediction. This also will help the Rosetta developers community to further develop the software and the reliability of its predictions.
HPF2 will focus on human-secreted proteins (proteins in the blood and the spaces between cells). These proteins can be important for signaling between cells and are often key markers for diagnosis. These proteins have even ended up being useful as drugs (when synthesized and given by doctors to people lacking the proteins). Examples of human secreted proteins turned into therapeutics are insulin and the human growth hormone. Understanding the function of human secreted proteins may help researchers discover the function of proteins of unknown function in the blood and other interstitial fluids.”
“What is AIDS?
UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, estimated that in 2004 there were more than 40 million people around the world living with HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. The virus has affected the lives of men, women and children all over the world. Currently, there is no cure in sight, only treatment with a variety of drugs.
Prof. Arthur J. Olson’s laboratory at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) is studying computational ways to design new anti-HIV drugs based on molecular structure. It has been demonstrated repeatedly that the function of a molecule — a substance made up of many atoms — is related to its three-dimensional shape. Olson’s target is HIV protease (“pro-tee-ace”), a key molecular machine of the virus that when blocked stops the virus from maturing. These blockers, known as “protease inhibitors”, are thus a way of avoiding the onset of AIDS and prolonging life. The Olson Laboratory is using computational methods to identify new candidate drugs that have the right shape and chemical characteristics to block HIV protease. This general approach is called “Structure-Based Drug Design”, and according to the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences, it has already had a dramatic effect on the lives of people living with AIDS.
Even more challenging, HIV is a “sloppy copier,” so it is constantly evolving new variants, some of which are resistant to current drugs. It is therefore vital that scientists continue their search for new and better drugs to combat this moving target.
Scientists are able to determine by experiment the shapes of a protein and of a drug separately, but not always for the two together. If scientists knew how a drug molecule fit inside the active site of its target protein, chemists could see how they could design even better drugs that would be more potent than existing drugs.
To address these challenges, World Community Grid’s FightAIDS@Home project runs a software program called AutoDock developed in Prof. Olson’s laboratory. AutoDock is a suite of tools that predicts how small molecules, such as drug candidates, might bind or “dock” to a receptor of known 3D structure.”
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There are currently about 98,000 members of this crunching community. We are called crunchers because that is what our computers do. Once having installed the software and chosen our projects, we are sent small work units to process. The finished data is sent back to WCG and we get new work units. How are we rewarded for our efforts? Really, just with the satisfactiuon of knowing that we might be helping to save lives. But, we do get little gifts, badges based upon our completed work. Some crunchers have organized themselves into teams. The teams compete for points or credits. There are al;l sorts of teams, from a few people organizing in a church or synagogue, to mega teams of techies building mroe and more Linux boxes.
So, 98,000. That is a lot of people; but not in a world with one billion computers. We want and need your help. I am personally crunching 24/7 on five machines – yesterday the sixth, an older PC died.
The cost in electricity? About the same as a 100-150 watt light bulb as long as you have your monitor on a power save setting.
All WCG projects run on software developed and continually upgraded by At UC Berkeley, The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing.You can download the little piece of BOINC software that makes this all happen either at WCG or http://boinc.berkeley.edu/.
If you choose to download the software at the BOINC page, there you will see a link to a whole other list of wonderful projects which are running independently of WCG.
So, please, won’t you give us a look?
