wer has been granted to the average worker. This has led to a notable improvement in research - multiple processors can work together to perform computations at a faster pace. This allows them to cope with more sophisticated models and graphics-heavy simulations.
Complex calculations like protein folding take best advantage of the grid's huge computing power
© KEVIN DREW
'Until grid technology came along, scientists tended to rely on stand-alone computers that were not connected to the outside world and to each other,' says Jasinski. 'This began to change with the internet, where computational jobs could be controlled remotely or sent to a colleague. Then peer-to-peer networking, the falling cost of processors and the advent of multiprocessor PCs began to make grid computing feasible.'
In many ways the WCG is revolutionary, combining technology and the collective power of linked PCs with the spirit of community to provide cheap, speedy and promising results. But Jasinski denies it is a futurist technology, even though decades ago grid computing may have been envisioned as science fiction. 'The World Community Grid is a great example of how the world can be made smarter by pooling the goodwill, ideas and resources of people without demanding an excessive amount of money or time,' he says. And when the world is faced with an ageing population, increasing chronic disease burden and poorly treated infectious diseases, time and money is of the essence in medical research.
This is exactly where the grid comes in. 'For example,' says Jasinski, 'if we have a million molecules we want to test to see if they will be effective as new drugs, we need to do one computation for each molecule. If I only have one computer and each calculation takes one minute, it will take me a million minutes or about two years to complete my task. On the other hand, if I have one million computers I can complete the task in about one minute by having each computer perform one calculation.'
The reality of this is already evident. For the 'Help fight childhood cancer project,' some 8000 years of research should be cut by using the grid, says Akira Nakagawara, president of the Chiba Cancer Centre at Chiba University in Japan. 'In the ordinary lab, it is absolutely impossible to do this kind of research,' he notes. The project is screening three million small compounds against six targets in the hope of finding about 30 chemicals that could potentially treat the childhood cancer neuroblastoma. Already seven chemicals that specifically kill the neuroblastoma cells have been finalised for the first target.
Likewise, the separate 'Help conquer cancer' project - which is analysing 86 million x-ray crystallography images to aid understanding of cancer-related proteins - has been able to dramatically slash research times. 'It is a long project even on the grid,' says Igor Jurisica from the Ontario Cancer Institute in Canada. 'But without WCG we would not be able to make this comprehensive analysis in our lifetime.' The computation helps the team to identify characteristic gene or protein expression 'signatures' that can assist in diagnosing and monitoring diseases, or predicting how well patients will respond to certain treatments. Three of the lung cancer signatures are in preclinical stage already, while similar signatures in leukaemia, ovarian and head and neck cancer are in the pipeline.
For Stan Watowich at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, US, doing research in this way is a no-brainer - particularly in disease areas considered high risk or financially unattractive. Watowich's team is using the WCG to find treatment cures for dengue fever and West Nile virus and has been able to cut research times from an estimated 25 years on traditional laboratory multiprocessor computers to just weeks via the WCG.
In the first phase of the project, the team investigated about 15 different proteins that could be potential drug targets because of the role each plays in disease pathogenesis. Some 2.5 million small drug-like molecules were screened agains