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Contact: Michael Patrick Rutter617-496-3185
Harvard's Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences Joins World Community Grid
Faculty, staff, and students can lend idle PC time to assist reseach on humanity's most pressing issueCAMBRIDGE, Mass., November 27, 2006 – Millions of personal computers sit idly on desks and in homes worldwide. During this idle time, the mysteries of science and space continue to elude us. What if each of the world’s estimated 650 million PCs could be linked to focus on humanity’s most pressing issues?
To make this vision a reality, the Harvard Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences has become a partner of World Community Grid, joining the IBM Corporation and a group of more than 240 companies, associations, foundations, nonprofits and academic institutions.
World Community Grid uses grid technology to establish a permanent, flexible infrastructure that provides researchers with a readily available pool of computational power that can be used to solve problems plaguing humanity. Grid technology joins together many individual computers, creating a large system with massive computational power that far exceeds the power of a few supercomputers. Importantly, World Community Grid is easy and safe to use.
In its first year, World Community Grid ran the Human Proteome Folding Project, which provided scientists with data on how individual proteins within the human body affect human health, enabling them to develop new cures for diseases like lyme disease, malaria and tuberculosis. Scientists now have descriptions of 120,000 protein domains that are critical to human well-being; without the benefit of this free grid technology, it would have taken 5 years to get these results, compared with just 12 months on World Community Grid.
On November 21, 2005 World Community Grid launched FightAIDS@Home. FightAIDS@Home, which is sponsored by The Scripps Research Institute, is using computational methods to identify new candidate drugs to block HIV protease, a key molecular structure that when blocked, stops the virus from maturing and thus is a way of avoiding the onset of AIDS and prolonging life.
On July 20, 2006, World Community Grid launched a new effort that will assist in cancer research using the massive computational power of World Community Grid. The Help Defeat Cancer project will use World Community Grid to analyze tissue microarrays (TMA) – a new investigative tool that will ultimately help doctors select proper treatments and provide accurate prognosis for cancer patients.