Grid does 420 years of PC work in four months

A BACKROOM OF boffins has used a grid computing project to do 420 years of work on a single PC to just four months.

Dubbed WISDOM (World-wide In Silico Docking On Malaria), the project stopped at the end of January and analysed an average of 80,000 drug compounds an hour, in search for a drug that will combat malaria. The grid used 5,000 computers at any one time and generated 2,000GB of useful data. Apparently the system processed more than 140 million compounds were processed and results are expected to speed up and cut the costs involved in searching for an anti-malaria drug.

Normally drug development is a long process, taking 12 years and costing around US$800 million, the project's top boffin Vincent Breton told Medical News Today. He said this process can be significantly accelerated and made cheaper using grids.

The computers in the grid 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. µ