The Network is the computer - Distributed Computing
CPU Cycles for Science
The Genome@home project uses many computers' spare CPU cycles to tackle the immense computations involved in genetic research.
By Stefan Larson, researcher at Stanford
March 15, 2001
(http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/showtell/story/0,23008,3316277,00.html)
From the article: "...By distributing the work of designing new genes to home, lab, and office PCs across the world, we're now able to design libraries of hundreds of new genes for several different proteins, every day.
Already, less than two months since launch, the network of enthusiastic Genome@home users have accomplished the equivalent of 20 CPU-years of protein design. This amount of data is already much more than we could have collected through traditional supercomputer approaches..."
=========================================================
Here is the link is you want to help out Stanford in this very important project - (ie. run the protein design algorithm): genomeathome.stanford.edu
Here is what you will be contributing: engineering new proteins for medical therapy, designing new pharmaceuticals, assigning functions to the dozens of new genes being sequenced every day and helping scientists understand protein evolution.
How you can help
To design these large numbers of protein sequences, we need lots of computers. By running the Genome@home protein sequence design client (http://genomeathome.stanford.edu/download.html), you can lend us your computer while you're not using it, for as long or as little as you like. It simply runs alongside your other programs and does its calculations in the unused cpu time while you're away from your desk, or even while you're working on your computer. You won't notice a loss of speed, and your computer will work as usual. All you see is a small window that shows you the protein sequences you're designing. If you don't want to look at it, just minimize the window and move it to a corner of your desktop. A day or two's worth of running Genome@home is enough to design new protein sequences that the world has never seen before. All the sequences get added to the Genome@home database, so every little bit helps.
============================================================
This is just another example of how distributed computing can be used. I suspect there are similar examples yet to be developed for "Peer-to-Peer" computing. Sunw continues to spend R&D dollars in this area. Remember, SUNW was originally started over at Stanford University and as a shareholder I would like to see my company help support such positive projects.
EKS |
