IBM Sponsors Humanitarian Grid Computing Project 181
BrianWCarver writes "Reuters reports that IBM and top scientific research organizations are joining forces in a humanitarian effort to tap the unused power of millions of computers and help solve complex social problems. Following the example of SETI@home, the project, dubbed The World Community Grid, will seek to tap the vast underutilized power of computers belonging to individuals and businesses worldwide and channel it into selected medical and environmental research programs. The first project to benefit will be Human Proteome Folding, an effort to identify the genetic structure of proteins that can cause diseases. The client is currently available for Windows XP, 2000, ME, and 98."
Forgive my ignorance... (Score:5, Insightful)
seriously (Score:0, Insightful)
a) cosuming your entire cpu resources
b) recieves instructions from the internet
c) sends back information gathered at your computer
d) has not provided any scientific value (a la seti@home)
this program could do anything! this looks like a perfect and cheap way for intelligence services to crack all those rsa keys they ever wanted.
distributed.net (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
I have plenty of unused cycles on 4-way Sun boxes with gigs of spare RAM, though.
It would be nice if they released a client in portable C.
Who benefits? (Score:2, Insightful)
Suppose it leads to the creation of a new revolutionary drug. Just exactly who will get the profits from the drug? (And who will have to travel to Canada to buy it?)
Re:seriously (Score:1, Insightful)
United Devices (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
I have plenty of unused cycles on 4-way Sun boxes with gigs of spare RAM, though.
Lets see: dozens or even hundreds of ``4-way Sun boxes'' versus hundreds of thousands of ``PIII 600''. Hmm. Guess I see why they didn't start with the Solaris version.
It would be nice if they released a client in portable C.
Yep.
How does one go about making sure that nobody makes a variant client which phones home with bogus results? Would that be harder to assure if everyone were compiling their own?
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Agree with the sentiment, but put it in its right magnitude, and you can see why Windows is the sole platform here.
How many people all over the world are like you, with CPU cycles to spare on non Wintel boxes?
How many PCs are around the world, and how many run Windows?
How many of those are used at home or small business?
Don't get me wrong, I am a UNIX/Linux fan, and dislike Windows. But if you want volume, Windows is where it is at the moment. Having said that, they have to release something more portable in the future. Just like SETI and others did.
pollution (Score:2, Insightful)
Windows only? (Score:1, Insightful)
Not all projects are truly humanitarian (Score:5, Insightful)
In the past, I've investigated a couple of projects, that upon closer scrutiny look quite troubling. They often fail to address what the actual project is specifically, and who will profit from the results financially. Instead, their websites are full of feel good graphics, but the bucks stop at a pharmaceutical company's coffers when you look at the fine details, and there's no discussion of what the findings will be specifically used for, and by whom. In some cases, the whole issue of profit and ownership is quite smoothly whitewashed.
Because IBM are control freaks? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now how is this really different from IBM's project?
A skeptic might think that IBM simply want to have a foot in the door of these big anarchic distributed projects.
Despite the stunning power available to this kind of distributed computing, it is less useful than it appears. In my research area (computational biology) [berkeley.edu], the effort of parallelizing an algorithm and collating the results is seldom worth the dividend in speedup. Supercomputers generally run idle at most universities, for this very reason.
Folding@home was a nice success story, and there are further applications of those models, e.g. simulations of prion aggregation [dailycal.org] (mad cow disease, Alzheimer's, etc). But (IMO) this is the exception, rather than the rule. Anyone who thinks that parallelization is a quick & easy panacea to difficult computational problems in general is living in a dream world (and I say that as a proud owner of several Macs with parallelized RISC CPUs *and* go-faster stripes).
I've lost count of the number of times I've heard these cheap parallelization ideas floated (another example is building cheap clusters out of console hardware [uiuc.edu] which I reckon I first heard in 1996!). And every other month someone offers me supercomputer time... the problem is in redesigning the algorithm to work in parallel. Certain algorithms, such as MCMC [umn.edu], are better suited to this treatment than others.
Of course, then you have to persuade a bunch of other scientists that Your Algorithm is the most deserving, which is a political issue (but hey, if it saves those CPUs from being used for the eminently futile task of looking for bug-eyed aliens, maybe it's a good thing...)
Re:Poor first impression (Score:2, Insightful)