We are all worms, but I do believe I am a glow-worm - Winston Churchill
|
|
|
World Community Grid burns energy in order to save it
IBM HAS TEAMED up with a gaggle of Harvard boffins to harness the power of your computer and solve the world energy crisis, AIDS, cancer and global starvation.
By launching the so called "World Community Grid project" IBM and its Harvard helpers hope to use the idle computer power of volunteers around the globe to help "benefit humanity".
Ye average living room PC which, let's face it, you probably only really use for surfing pr0n and playing solitaire, can actually make itself much more useful, carrying out billions of calculations a second in the name of science. Even if you're actually using your computer for work, there's probably still oodles of power going spare, which distributed computing would gladly slurp up.
So, what would all this spare horsepower be used for? Well the current project spotlight, being dubbed the Clean Energy Project, is on solar energy, or more specifically, finding organic materials to make more efficient, cheaper solar cells.
At the moment, silicon-based solar cells are a bit useless at only about 20 per cent efficiency and a cost of about $3 a watt of electricity generated. Organic solar cells should hopefully prove to be much cheaper, flexible, and lightweight, but finding the right one involves carrying out countless chemical calculations on tens of thousands of molecules to see which ones look most promising.
Using processing power from hundreds of thousands of people's idle computers, scientists can quickly number-crunch all the relevant molecular equations on the grid server, hopefully leading to the discovery not only of new organic photovoltaics for cheap solar cells, but also possible polymers for the membranes used in fuel cells.
"It would take us about 100 days of computational time to screen each of the thousands of compounds for electronic properties without the power of World Community Grid," said Alan Aspuru-Guzik, head investigator and a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, at Harvard. He added that by distributing the computations among thousands of volunteered computers, the project could be completed in just two years, compared to about 20 years using a supercomputer.
It's not the first time scientists have come cap in hand begging for some spare processing power. Stanford's Folding at Home project has been running for eight years trying to unravel molecular protein chains through distributed computing, whilst SETI has been busily scanning the skies for ET while your computer snoozes.
But IBM's World Community Grid is the largest public humanitarian grid so far, counting 413,000-plus members spread over 200 countries and linking to over a million computers. Other projects on the World Community Grid include researching new cancer-fighting drugs, improving the nutritional content of rice by examining new protein structures, and trying to prevent the onset of AIDS.
IBM also says it will pilot World Community Grid on a new IBM internal cloud and plans to let clients of IBM cloud computing services chip in if they want, giving them a chance to feel good about themselves for contributing to humanitarian research.
If any of our esteemed readers also want in on that smug, self important feeling of do-gooding, you can sign up to the World Community Grid and donate unused computer time to create unnecessary extra carbon emissions here. µ
Tags: Ibm
Share this:
Share
I use WCG/BOINC because I think that the energy used to run it is well spent. My friend doesn't use it because he diligently turns off his computer to save energy. I don't judge him for his choice, though he's criticised me. But we both tend to upgrade our computers around every 5 years. At least the computer materials, and disposal costs I've consumed went to some added use other than surfing the web. So it's not just about saving energy, it's about putting what you have to good use.
Hi, I think it's good that you raise questions about this sort of thing. When multinationals claim to be doing good it is always dubious. But one thing I found on the WCG site that I thought was important to note was this:
"World Community Grid is making technology available only to public and not-for-profit organizations to use in humanitarian research that might otherwise not be completed due to the high cost of the computer infrastructure required in the absence of a public grid. As part of our commitment to advancing human welfare, all results will be in the public domain and made public to the global research community."
In other words, this is a chance for independent research to be carried out that will not result in the patenting of lifeforms or technology, or in research findings that suit the interests of private sponsors. These things are pretty rare in the world of science these days, aren't they?
Also, if the computers are running anyway, then how does that increase the carbon footprint? Also, to Vitor Bastos: this part of the site goes into detail about results: www.worldcommunitygrid.org/projects_showcase/viewProjectArchives.do
Best of luck.
I just visited the site today, and I found absolutely ZERO reports on the results of the 3 completed projects. Did they really help "defeat cancer" in their "Help Defeat Cancer" project? How? Did we do anything useful at all?
Those are the questions the PRESS should be doing, I'd like to ask THE INQUIRER to actually INQUIRE on the subject.
The projects noted in the article along with many more can be found through the BOINC Project at Califorinia's Berkely College. Instead of having researchers purchase, operate and pay for dozens of new supercomputers they use existing computers already paid for with no need for additional resource usage. Definitely a green idea
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
There are still more projects using this form that are not using BOINC, but this is the most convenient way to own part of a supercomputer :P
Yes, yes I think they probably have thought it through. May I refer you to the Laws of Thermodynamics, which state that you can't do anything without using energy and increasing entropy? WCG would be useless and self-indulgent only if the results it produces were not worth the energy dissipated in the process. Look at the lights blazing all night in our government's multi-storey office buildings, or the amazing conspicuous waste of energy in places like New York and Las Vegas, and then tell us that leading-edge research into disease agents, protein structure, and the like is wasteful.