DISTRIBUTED COMPUTATION
Wish you could use all those wasted CPU cycles for something other than detecting extraterrestrials?
FightAIDS@home, a project run by Entropia, a San Diego-based distributed computing company, aims to do for AIDS research what SETI@home has done for alien watching.
PC users can download free software from Entropia (www.fightaidsathome.com), and then donate their systems' idle processing power to help researchers generate and test millions of drug compounds to fight AIDS. In the first 30 days after the program's September launch, users contributed more than half a million CPU-hours to the effort.
"What we're really interested in looking at is a huge number of potential drugs and targeting a huge number of proteins," says Arthur Olson, director of the Molecular Graphics Laboratory at the Scripps Research Institute, a biomedical research organization in La Jolla, California, that's collaborating with Entropia.
The AIDS virus is a particularly difficult target because it can mutate quickly into strains that resist existing drugs. By tapping into Entropia's network of PCs, Scripps researchers can rapidly process calculations on millions of new drug variants to see how they might bind with a protein to combat the virus. If a drug design run by a participant's PC proves effective, Entropia acknowledges the user on its site.
But not all your extra power is going to AIDSresearch: About 10 percent of the donated CPU cycles are routed to commercial tasks such as pinging Web sites that pay Entropia to test their ability to handle traffic. "We can make money," says CEO Jim Madsen, "and make the world a better place, too."
MUST READ
The 38th Parallel Port
Flipping the Optical Switch
The Hit Charade
Ask Dr. Bob
Adventures in Mind Control
The New Pod People
People
Jargon Watch
The CPU Cure
Eyes of Truth
IM Not a Crook
Pulling Down Serious Gs
Raw Data
