Researchers from IBM and Harvard are teaming up to produce cheaper, more efficient solar cells. It’s a noble effort, and solar could certainly use the help as it struggles to gain traction.
Yet what’s most interesting here is not the research itself, but the way in which it’s being conducted. These scientists won’t be squirrelled away in some university basement. Rather, they’ll be using the computing power from a network of idle PCs around the world to screen organic compounds for certain electronic properties.
The project is the latest by the World Community Grid, an enormously powerful but relatively unknown IBM venture that makes use of grid computing. “Grid technology harnesses unused cycle time – the computing power – of individual PCs, and groups them together to form a virtual supercomputer,” said Stanley Litow, IBM’s VP for corporate citizenship and affairs.
Sure enough, the World Community Grid is running at an average of 179 Teraflops, roughly equivalent to the 11th most powerful supercomputer on earth. (The current heavyweight, IBM’s Roadrunner, runs at more than 1 Petaflop or 1,000 trillion calculations per second.)
Altruistic Grid members sign up and download a small application. Then, when their computers go idle, instead of a screensaver coming on, the Grid takes over and voilà! – a MacBook in Chicago becomes a node in a worldwide supercomputer.
IBM launched the Grid four years ago, and has invested $5 million worth of resources in the project. Already, it is being used to help cure cancer and fight AIDS to good effect. But IBM’s Litow is frustrated more people don’t know about the Grid, or its good works. “We have all of these very very serious humanitarian issues that are crying out for supercomputing power to create solutions,” he said. “The potential of the WCG is really monumental.”
Take the Help Conquer Cancer project, which aims to improve the results of protein X-ray crystallography, thereby helping researchers understand cancer initiation, progression and treatment. Since the launch of the cancer project last November, Grid members have contributed almost 19,627 years of run time, returning 24,502,692 results, or about 16% of the work.
Now, Harvard Professor Alan Aspuru-Guzik, hopes to find compounds that will make better solar cells, ultimately leading to wider adoption of clean energy sources. Aspuru-Guzik said with the help of the Grid, he expects to complete 22 years worth of computations in two years.
Grid computing has been put to use for scientific research before, most notably through the SETI@home program, in which users volunteer their idle PCs to scan radio telescope data for signs of alien life.
SETI@home has attracted more than five million users. The World Community Grid, with just over 413,000 members volunteering 1.2 million computers, has a long way to go. Litow want this to change. He remembers that when the Grid launched, one commenter remarked, “Forget about aliens, let’s cure AIDS.”
