PC grid to focus on global hunger crisis

15-05-2008

by Billy MacInnes

A project to develop stronger strains of rice aims to complete 200 years of research work in just two years by harnessing unused and donated power from individual PCs.

The University of Washington programme is seeking to develop rice crops with larger and more nutritious yields using IBM's World Community Grid which has access to the computing power from close to 1 million individual PCs, equivalent to 167 teraflops.

Known as "Nutritious Rice for the World", the project will study rice at the atomic level and combine it with traditional cross-breeding techniques used by farmers. IBM claims using the World Community Grid will reduce the time taken by the project from 200 years using more conventional systems to just two years.

World Community Grid will run a three-dimensional modelling programme created by computational biologists at the University of Washington to study the structures of the proteins that make up the building blocks of rice.

"The issue is that there are between 30,000 and 60,000 different protein structures to study," said principal investigator, Dr. Ram Samudrala, associate professor in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Washington.

"Using traditional experimental approaches in the laboratory to identify detailed structure and function of critical proteins would take decades."

The project will create the largest and most comprehensive map of rice proteins and their related functions, helping agriculturalists and farmers pinpoint which plants should be selected for cross-breeding to cultivate better crops.

Robin Wilner, IBM vice president for global community initiatives, told ENN the project was particularly significant because it was the first to deal with food and hunger. To date, the World Community Grid has been involved with 10 projects since it was launched in November 2004.

She stressed IBM was not trying to get people to leave their PCs on or use more electricity. "There's no energy cost because we're harvesting idle cycle time," Wilner said, adding it was "amazing how much value in computational time we can harness".

World Community Grid is expecting to reach 1 million registered computers by next week. To date, the project has been involved in several research projects in areas like cancer, AIDS and climate modelling.

Anyone with a computer running Windows, Linux or Mac OS, and internet access can be a part of the solution. To donate unused computer time, individuals register on www.worldcommunitygrid.org and install a free, small, secure software programme on their computers.