Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Your Spare Computing Power Could Help Fight Zika

Blockbuster discoveries, as any scientist will tell you, are very much the exception in the world of research. The day-to-day work on the way there is usually painstaking, repetitive, and unremarkable.

To begin to figure out how to fight an emerging virus, for instance, biomedical researchers first must understand the structure of the disease on a microscopic level. They must figure out the mechanisms that make it transmissible, then screen countless chemical compounds to determine how to fight it. Each of these steps requires difficult and meticulous work—the screening process alone can drag on for years. Eventually, if a certain compound appears to disable a key protein that makes a virus dangerous to humans, that compound might unlock a possible cure for the disease. At that point, there’s even more work to do.
“They’re able to do things that are unimaginable to most scientists.”

Before there were computers, all this work was simply done by hand. Scientists would plop a virus in a test tube, sprinkle in some dirt, and see what happened. (You can understand, then, why science and serendipity seem to overlap so much in the annals of discovery.) Now, such processes can be a bit more comprehensive: Computational models—of compounds and of virus proteins—can methodically discern how a virus might react to various mixes of chemicals.

But even with machines, there’s only so much work that a single computer—or a lab full of computers, or even a supercomputer—can do over a certain amount of time. That’s why, for more than a decade, an IBM-run initiative has helped scientists tap into the computing power of millions of machines across the planet as a way to speed up research into deadly diseases and other public health problems. The World Community Grid is an open-source lab that runs on the power of idle computers across the globe. Anyone can sign up to donate their machine’s untapped power.

More than 700,000 volunteers have helped biomedical researchers process complex datasets since the project launched in 2004. How it works: The grid leverages the connectivity of the web by dividing otherwise enormous processing tasks—like checking a library of 100 million chemical compounds to see how each individually reacts to a model of Zika proteins— into manageable chunks that are then delegated to computers across the network. That computational data is then sent back to the grid, cleaned up and checked for errors, and finally delivered back to scientists for evaluation. This is how researchers already identified a possible treatment for neuroblastoma, a childhood cancer. And it’s how today, while your computer is idle, you could help run computations to fight the Zika virus.

 

Read the original post here: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/zika-idle-computer-world-community-grid/483887/

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