[CAnet - news] Canadian Cancer Researchers Take Work to World Community Grid

For more information on this item please visit my blog at 
http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
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 [It is great to see researchers take advantage of these new low cost P2P
grids and commercial services such as Amazon.  The cost savings can be
significant compared to purchasing HPC clusters and the like.  From
www.gridtoday.com -- BSA]

Canadian Cancer Researchers Take Work to World Community Grid

TORONTO, Nov. 6 -- Canadian researchers expect to accelerate the war on
cancer by tapping into a global network of hundreds of thousands of people
who volunteer their idle computer time to tackle some of the world's most
complex problems.

The research team, led by Dr. Igor Jurisica at the Ontario Cancer Institute
(OCI), and scientists at Princess Margaret Hospital and University Health
Network, are the first from Canada to use the World Community Grid, a
network of PCs and laptops with the power equivalent to one of the globe's
top five fastest supercomputers.

The team will use World Community Grid to analyze the results of experiments
on proteins using data collected by scientists at the Hauptman-Woodward
Medical Research Institute in Buffalo, N.Y. This analysis would take
conventional computer systems 162 years to complete. However, using World
Community Grid, Jurisica anticipates the analysis could be finished in one
to two years, and will provide researchers with a better way to study how
proteins function, insight that could lead to the development of more
effective cancer-fighting drugs.

"We know that most cancers are caused by defective proteins in our bodies,
but we need to better understand the specific function of those proteins and
how they interact in the body," said Jurisica. "We also have to find
proteins that will enable us to diagnose cancer earlier, before symptoms
appear, to have the best chance of treating the disease -- or potentially
stopping it completely."

The research team now has more than 86 million images of 9,400 unique
proteins that could be linked to cancer, captured in the course of more than
14.5 million experiments by colleagues at Hauptman-Woodward.

This comprises the most comprehensive database on the chemistry of a large
number of proteins, a resource that will help researchers around the world
unlock the mystery of how many cancers, such as breast, prostate or
childhood leukemia, grow.

Approximately 150,000 Canadians will be diagnosed with cancer and more than
70,000 will die of the disease in 2007 alone.

World Community Grid, sponsored by the IBM Corp., uses grid technology to
establish a permanent, flexible infrastructure that provides researchers
around the world with a readily available pool of free computational power
that can be used to solve problems plaguing humanity.

Individuals can donate their computers for this project by registering on
www.worldcommunitygrid.org, and installing a free, secure, small software
program on their computers. The computer requests data from World Community
Grid's server when it is idle, for example a user is at lunch, and performs
the cancer-related protein computations. A screen saver will tell
individuals when their computers are being used.

World Community Grid, the largest public humanitarian grid with more than
333,000-plus members and links to more than 780,000 computers. However, it's
estimated that there are one billion computers worldwide, underscoring the
potential for the grid and its computational power to significantly expand.
Eight projects have been run on World Community Grid to date, including
protein folding and FightAIDS@Home, which completed five years of HIV/AIDS
research in just six months. Additional projects are in the pipeline.

For more information on IBM, visit www.ibm.com.

For more information on World Community Grid, visit
www.worldcommunitygrid.org.

For more information on Hauptman-Woodward, visit www.hwi.edu.

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Source: IBM


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