Posted by
Juan Hindo in
Today, the White House is bringing academia together with the public and private sectors to discuss progress on President Obama’s Materials Genome Initiative. Announced last June, the effort seeks to harness the power of modern computing and communications technologies to enable U.S. companies to discover, develop, manufacture, and deploy advanced materials at twice the speed than is possible today – at a fraction of the cost.
One of the projects that the White House sees fit to highlight today as an example of this kind of innovation and collaboration just happens to be an effort hosted on IBM’s World Community Grid. The White House is pointing to the work of Prof. Alán Aspuru-Guzik, an associate professor at Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, whose team is running The Clean Energy Project, perhaps the largest computational chemistry experiment ever.
With oil production peaking in the near future, alternative sources of energy are becoming increasingly important. In order to develop new energy-related technologies, highly engineered materials are needed. In particular, novel designs for solar cells and fuel cells based on organic molecules often require molecules with very specific characteristics to efficiently capture and store energy.
Instead of physically testing and manufacturing all or even some molecular materials with high potential, the Aspuru-Guzik group is performing a massive number of computational chemistry calculations to predict the properties and behavior of seven million organic molecules. Then, only the most promising candidates that might boost the performance of solar cells based on organic molecules are more closely examined. Last year, the team identified a molecule that could make for extraordinary semiconductors. Within about a year, data from the 1,000 or so of the most tantalizing calculations will be made available to all for further development.
What makes Professor Aspuru-Guzik’s project even more interesting and relevant to the Materials Genome Initiative is that it is being made possible by IBM’s World Community Grid. World Community Grid exemplifies the extraordinary results of a partnership among academia, the private sector, and the general public. World Community Grid marshals the spare computational power of PCs volunteered by the general public, and provides it – free of charge – to scientists who want to accelerate their research into cures for cancer, AIDS and other diseases; advance solar energy and clean water; and develop healthier food.
Volunteers download a small application to their Windows, Mac OS or Linux computers which crunch numbers for researchers when the volunteers’ computing devices aren’t otherwise being used – even between keystrokes. To date, nearly 600,000 individuals and organizations in more than 80 countries have registered two million devices for World Community Grid’s use on 21 projects. Scientists have told us that it collapses research times of 100 years or more to just 12 months or so.
Since its inception, World Community Grid has delivered more than 620 million research results. It is equivalent in speed and capacity to the some of the world’s 15 fastest traditional supercomputers, and is the largest and most diverse grid computing project dedicated to practical humanitarian research.
So, if someone wants to talk about practical mechanisms to accelerate the pace of discovery at a lower cost, they needn’t look terribly far. Certainly, there are many other resources, technologies and collaborations to enable the research and development of all sorts of novel materials. However, we couldn’t be prouder to offer a resource that resonates strongly with the scientific community and volunteers alike, and is available today and for the foreseeable future.
Juan Hindo is a program manager with IBM’s Corporate Citizenship & Corporate Affairs group.
More on the Materials Genome Initiative
Article: White House Highlights Materials Genome Initiative
Article: New Commitments Support Administration’s Materials Genome Initiative
Materials Genome Initiative for Global Competitiveness
Fact Sheet: Progress on Materials Genome Initiative
More Articles About World Community Grid
Anatomy of a Project for Sustainable Water
Simpler is Better for Saving Our Waterways
Helping to Find Cures for Childhood Cancer
World Community Grid and the Greening of Information Technology
A little over three years ago, a group of faculty members at the University of Virginia were meeting weekly to see what they might do to encourage awareness of issues of global sustainability among their students. The faculty members represented seven different schools and brought diverse expertise to the subject. But how to start was the more elusive question.
The new Vice President for Research, Tom Skalak, challenged the group to devise a simulation model that could be played as a game with student participants. The faculty were a bit skeptical of the idea, but thought it through anyway. It was decided that the Chesapeake Bay would make a good subject for this simulation game. The Bay represents a complex socio-environmental system, the University is located in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, and the Bay is under considerable environmental stress.
Thus was born the UVA Bay Game®. Mustering support from an outside consultant with experience in modeling environmental systems, and with the help of a team of systems engineering graduate students, the initial version of the Bay Game was launched on Earth Day 2009 with over 130 U.Va. students playing the game in the roles of crop farmers, land developers, watermen, and assorted regulators.
Built in a scant four months, Bay Game 0.9 had its bugs and glitches, but it validated the idea that a well-designed simulation game would achieve the goal of bringing students to an understanding of how complex socio-environmental systems give rise to often unanticipated outcomes. These outcomes are not predictable and would be different with every game play as different assumptions and decisions would lead to very different outcomes — a learning experience.
Buoyed by the success of this the initial version, the faculty continued to work to improve the Bay Game adding more realism, richer graphics and data, and more role-types. Now in its third major release, the Bay Game has been played by undergraduate and graduate students; actual regulators, farmers, and watermen; at the U.S. House of Representatives; and with great reception from businesses. Executives from IBM, GE, Dupont, Goldman Sachs, Coca-Cola, and Intel to name a few have played the Bay Game and derived insights leading to innovative solutions to the problem of water quality that their firms could act upon.
Building on this success, the University of Virginia team decided to investigate the underlying simulation model — highly aggregated in the Bay Game — and develop a much more detailed, simulation-only model. It became apparent that such a model would require enormous computing capacity to execute. That’s when we discovered IBM’s World Community Grid. U.Va. submitted a proposal to the World Community Grid and the proposal was accepted with two other proposals — both water-related.
The simulation model developed for execution on the World Community Grid is called Computing for Sustainable Water. Although this model was initially developed to study the Chesapeake Bay, it was designed for rapid deployment to other bodies of water. Computing for Sustainable Water was first announced to the public on April 19, 2012 . It runs on many of the more than 2-million computers volunteered by individuals in over 80 countries. Within one year, the results of more than 1.3 million separate simulation experiments will be gathered for analysis by the team of scientists at the University of Virginia.
This productive collaboration between the University of Virginia and IBM is an example of how to leverage the intellectual capital of both organizations toward solving one of the pressing problems of society. Even before all the results are in, we at U.Va. consider this a great success!
Gerard P. Learmonth is an associate professor of systems and information engineering at the University of Virginia
Related Resources:
Podcast with Dr. Learmonth about Computing for Sustainable Water project
Read the Press Release Announcing Computing for Sustainable Water project
More Blog Posts About World Community Grid:
Simpler is Better for Saving Our Waterways
Helping to Find Cures for Childhood Cancer
World Community Grid and the Greening of Information Technology
I’ll Take “Curing Malaria” for $1,000, Alex
Philippe Cousteau — environmental advocate, University of Virginia OpenGrounds Fellow and Azure Worldwide co-founder — writes about how World Community Grid is using donated, unused computing power to help save the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.
As a social entrepreneur and environmental advocate, I know first-hand how easy it is to become overwhelmed by the challenges facing our world. How can I make a difference? Where do I even start? These are questions I ask myself frequently, and questions I know many others ask all around the world. Fortunately, one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned over the years is that big challenges don’t always require big complex solutions.
In fact, in many cases the answers might be right in front of us.
Such is the case with the Computing for Sustainable Water Project from World Community Grid and the University of Virginia. This project tackles a very big, very complex challenge: predicting the environmental and economic impact of human actions on critical water resources over the next 20 years. Before we look at the unique approach IBM and the University of Virginia are taking to address this challenge, let’s take a moment to look at
the importance of the undertaking.
My grandfather Jacques-Yves Cousteau and my father Philippe called Earth the “Water Planet” for a very good reason. Water, not oil, uranium or gold, is our most precious natural resource. In all of its forms, from salt water to fresh, water supports all life on Earth.
With an increasing world population and growing stresses from agriculture, pollution and development, water is quickly becoming one of our most endangered resources. Effective and smart management of our water resources requires targeted information and strategies today, not some point in the distant future.
This is where the Computing for Sustainable Water Project comes into play.
Based on the University of Virginia’s model that simulates the actions of the more than
17 million people living on the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, the Computing for Sustainable Water Project aims to provide insights that could be used to inform policies and decision making for major waterways and ecosystems worldwide. To do that in a timely manner, however, the University of Virginia and IBM teams would need to condense 90 years of computational research into just one year – an expensive and time consuming proposition.
Which brings me back to one of my original questions: Where do you even start? As it turns out, the answer was sitting on desks, counters and kitchen tables in homes, schools, businesses and offices around the world. Through a free application, the World Community Grid makes it possible for all of us to be part of the solution by powering the Computing for Sustainable Water Project through our computers when they aren’t in use. This is a relatively simple solution that’s fast, runs automatically and requires no time or effort from its volunteers. Best of all, it’s a great starting point for people to become engaged and involved in the stewardship of our planet.
It’s innovative partnerships and projects like these that give me the most hope for the future. My grandfather and father had a simple vision of creating a world where every child can breathe fresh air, drink clean water and walk on green grass under a blue sky. Sometimes, simple visions and simple solutions can be our most powerful tools of change.
Explorer, social entrepreneur and environmental advocate, Philippe Cousteau is the son
of Jan and Philippe Cousteau Sr., and the grandson of Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau.
In addition to his work in environmental education and media, Philippe is co-founder of Azure Worldwide, a strategic environmental design, development and marketing company. Projects include work in green site design/planning, eco-tourism and new media.
Through an alliance with the University of Virginia, where he is an OpenGrounds Fellow, Philippe is aiding in the development and promotion of the UVA Bay Game®, a revolutionary interactive game that simulates the impact of individuals and communities on the health of critical water resources.
Related Resources:
Read the press release about this announcement
More Articles About World Community Grid:
Helping to Find Cures for Childhood Cancers
World Community Grid and the Greening of Information Technology
Posted by
Stanley S. Litow in
“Can we extract lessons from the for-profit world and apply them to philanthropy?” That’s the question being asked by Harvard Business School and other institutions that are training tomorrow’s global leaders. At the recent Center for Social Value Creation (CSVC) Social Enterprise Symposium, I spoke with University of Maryland M.B.A. students to help them understand the evolution of philanthropy, and their roles in creating sustainable value to help build a smarter planet.
Young leaders need to understand that corporate philanthropy is an integral part of a successful and sustainable business strategy. For an organization to survive, its core values must remain consistent in a world where everything else is guaranteed to change.
So when it comes to philanthropy, the phrase “from spare change to real change” must represent a values-based commitment to social responsibility. In IBM’s case, this means deploying our best technology and talent to address critical societal issues around the world.
Watch this video to learn about how programs such as the Corporate Service Corps,
P-TECH, and World Community Grid are raising the effectiveness of public-private partnerships to new levels. Read what city mayors and volunteer experts are saying
about improving the quality of life in cities – where 70 percent of the world’s population
lives. Find out how nonprofit leaders are using private-sector management skills to deliver social services more efficiently.
In the world’s most forward-thinking academic, civic, and corporate environments, tomorrow’s leaders are learning from Day One to work together to help manage global challenges. Organizations that seek to lead will attract, motivate and retain top talent by giving them opportunities for service. Meanwhile, the world’s leading enterprises will continue to adapt to change while maintaining their core values of innovation, service,
and citizenship.
Stanley S. Litow is IBM’s Vice President of Corporate Citizenship & Corporate Affairs
and President of the IBM International Foundation.
Related Resources:
Download “Corporate Social Responsibility: An Integrated Approach” (presentation)
Harvard Business Review: “IBM Corporate Citizenship Efforts ‘Enrich the Ecosystem’”
2010 IBM Corporate Responsibility Report
Posted by
Bill Boverman in
As we mark this year’s International Childhood Cancer Day, please consider joining the World Community Grid project seeking to find childhood cancer treatments. The International Confederation of Childhood Cancer Parent Organizations established International Childhood Cancer Day in 2002 to raise global public awareness about childhood cancer. The tragic reality is that 175,000 children worldwide are diagnosed with cancer each year, and an estimated 90,000 of these children will die from the disease.
World Community Grid is running Help Fight Childhood Cancer – a project designed to help find a treatment for this dreaded disease. The Principal Investigator for the project is Dr. Akira Nakagawara, president of the Chiba Cancer Center in Chiba, Japan. Dr. Nakagawara is also the President of the International Society of Pediatric Oncology, Asia (SIOP) – one of the driving forces behind childhood cancer awareness.
Please help us in raising awareness of International Childhood Cancer Day and the Help Fight Childhood Cancer project. Then join the global effort to help find treatments for childhood cancers by contributing your unused computing power to World Community Grid.
If you already are a member of World Community Grid, click here to find out whether your computer is set up to help with this vital project. If you haven’t yet signed up for World Community Grid, please register now so you can help us provide technology to researchers so they can make the world a healthier place. Joining is safe, secure, and free.
Bill Boverman is Executive Project Manager, Application Services Delivery Excellence, with IBM Global Business Services
Read More About World Community Grid:
World Community Grid and the Greening of Information Technology
I’ll Take “Curing Malaria” for $1,000, Alex
Japanese Version:
ワールド・コミュニティ・グリッドは小児がんの治療薬の発見を支援しています
みなさん、国際小児がんデー（International Childhood Cancer Day）をご存知ですか？毎年、世界中で17万5千人もの子ども達ががんと診断され、そのうちおよそ9万人の子ども達が幼い命を奪われています。こうした悲しい現実を知ってもらう目的で、国際小児がん親の会連盟（International Confederation of Childhood Cancer Parent Organizations）は2002年に国際小児がんデー（2月15日）を設定しました。
国際小児がんデーを契機に、小児がんの治療薬の発見を支援しているワールド・コミュニティー・グリッドのプロジェクトへの参加を是非ご検討ください。ワールド・コミュニティー・グリッドでは、この非常に恐ろしい病気の治療薬の発見を支援するため、「ファイト！小児がんプロジェクト」（Help Fight Childhood Cancer Project）を展開しています。このプロジェクトの研究責任者は、千葉県にある千葉県がんセンター センター長の中川原 章氏です。中川原氏は、国際小児がん学会（SIOP）のアジア代表も務めており、小児がんについて知っていただく活動を推進していらっしゃいます。是非、ワールド・コミュニティ・グリッドに登録し、皆さんがパソコンを使用していない時間のコンピューティング能力を「ファイト！小児がんプロジェクト」に提供してください。これによって、小児がんの治療薬を発見することに貢献できる、この世界的な取り組みに参加することができます。
既にワールド・コミュニティー・グリッドのメンバーである皆様は、こちらをクリックいただくと、現在ご使用のパソコンが、このプロジェクトを支援できるようにセットアップされているかどうかを確認できます。ワールド・コミュニティー・グリッドに未登録の皆様は、こちらをクリックして今すぐご登録ください。ワールド・コミュニティー・グリッドは、セキュリティーが確保された環境であるため、安全に参加できます。参加は無料です。
子ども達に対する小児がんの脅威を少しでも少なくし、より健康的に暮らせる世界を実現できるよう、皆様の積極的なご参加とご協力をお願いいたします。
Posted by
John Lamb in
IBM Senior Information Technology Architect John Lamb, Ph.D. explains the inner workings of World Community Grid, and how it contributes to humanitarian research while helping to reduce the environmental impact of large-scale computing.
By making use of our unused compute power, World Community Grid has saved an immense amount of electrical energy and reduced the carbon footprint that would have resulted from the use of traditional High Performance Computing. World Community Grid is a significant contributor to green information technology (IT) and is a great way for anyone to be involved in green IT with the added benefit of helping to address global environmental and health concerns.
World Community Grid is based on grid computing, and like cloud computing – the subset of grid computing that includes utility computing and other approaches to sharing computing resources – is based on the concept of IT virtualization. The IT industry is on a track to use virtualization to manage the needs of IT customers in a way that helps reduce the needs for energy consumption and computer hardware. For each of its projects, World Community Grid aggregates the unused computing power of more than 200,000 donor machines around the world to form a virtual supercomputer. World Community Grid then makes its massive computing power available free of charge to humanitarian research projects – everything from the search for cures for disease to simulations that yield insights into global environmental concerns.
One of those concerns – the energy resources and carbon footprint associated with large-scale computing – is addressed directly by World Community Grid. In fact, some World Community Grid research projects are environmental in nature and are helping to reduce carbon footprint in other ways. Searching for new molecular compounds that could be used to make less expensive and more efficient solar cells is just one example.
By consolidating the unused computing power of machines that in some cases draw 30 to 40 percent of their maximum energy requirements even when idle, World Community Grid is designed to help reduce environmental impact. This is detailed by the chart below, which shows the typical utilization rates of different classes of computers – from large corporate mainframes to the Intel-based servers used for smaller computing jobs and in most PCs.
Multi-million dollar mainframes typically are utilized on a 24/7 basis at least partly because of the large financial investments they represent. Mainframe processes are typically computing intensive, and are run at all times – including nights and weekends. By contrast, smaller Intel-based servers are not typically used at night or on weekends. Therefore, creating virtual servers from underutilized Intel-based machines not only allows much better and easier sharing of resources, but also distributes utilization more evenly on the large physical machines that host virtual servers.
The PCs that supply their unused computing power to World Community Grid have similar characteristics to underutilized Intel-based servers. Most Intel-based servers are only utilized between five and 15 percent of the time, and most PCs – in terms of their true computing capacity – are utilized almost none of the time!
It is important to note that World Community Grid aggregates spare computing time unobtrusively and without substantially increasing energy consumption. Contributors to World Community Grid are not asked use their computers any differently than normal.
That is, they are not asked to run them 24/7 or prevent them from going to sleep or shutting down. In addition, World Community Grid defaults to using only 60 percent of spare computing time to use less energy. On a typical laptop computer, World Community Grid use increases power consumption by only three watts – less than an incandescent night light. Community members also can adjust the default 60 percent figure to whatever is preferred or appropriate for their hardware or software.
By making use of otherwise unused compute power, World Community Grid saves an immense amount of electrical energy and reduces the carbon footprint typically associated with High Performance Computing using supercomputers. A supercomputer, in addition to its own power consumption, needs a very large additional amount of power for cooling. World Community Grid avoids this issue since participating machines are usually single units that do not substantially increase the heat in their environments. Thus, running a research project on World Community Grid typically requires much smaller energy expenditure than running the same project on a supercomputer.
All of these factors enable World Community Grid to make significant contributions to green IT. As one of the hundreds of thousands of contributors to World Community Grid, I am proud to help support vital humanitarian research while helping to bring about the greening
of IT.
John Lamb is a Senior Technical Staff Member and Senior Certified IT Architect for IBM. Dr. Lamb is the author of The Greening of IT: How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment (2009).
Related Article:
Posted by
Alex Perryman in
It’s elementary, my dear Watson. Oh, wait…..I’m not Sherlock Holmes, and a very different Watson is helping me out.
And instead of tracking down a clever thief, this Watson helped me start the search for new ways to stop a monster that kills almost a million people each year — most of them children.
The microscopic monster is the pervasive parasite known as Plasmodium falciparum — which causes the deadliest form of malaria and kills more people than any other parasite. The Watson who is helping me is not a fictional character, or even a real person — it’s IBM’s Watson computing system, which defeated human competitors on the Jeopardy! game show tournament earlier this year.
No, Watson isn’t giving us advice on killing malaria. Rather, part of the cash prize that Watson won went to Professor Art Olson’s lab at The Scripps Research Institute, where we are using it to create a new project on World Community Grid called the “Global Online Fight Against Malaria,” which launches today.
It’s the largest computational research project ever performed against drug-resistant malaria. Unfortunately, many strains of malaria have become resistant to the different drug treatments (they almost always do, eventually).
Working on malaria started as a hobby that I advanced during nights and weekends for a couple years, when I wasn’t working on FightAIDS@Home, Professor Olson’s project on World Community Grid that seeks a cure for HIV. With persistence and a lot of help from IBM and from fellow Scripps Research scientists, we’re now addressing malaria.
I should emphasize that this initiative seeks new malaria treatments, not a vaccine. Of course, the two would be complementary; the vaccine will help prevent illness, and drug treatments will address those who never received the vaccine, or for whom the vaccine wasn’t permanently effective.
We will use World Community Grid to computationally evaluate millions of candidate compounds that might disrupt the proteins the Plasmodiumparasites need in order to survive, multiply, or infect a person. If these target molecules can be disabled by the right chemical compounds, then patients infected with superbugs of malaria can potentially be cured.
It’s like trying to find the right key to open a particular lock. However, both the lock and the keys are flexible — they can change shape, or transform their conformation, as they wiggle, jiggle, dance, expand, and contract in the warm watery environment in which they reside. In addition to needing to find a complementary match between the different flexible shapes of the lock and the potential keys, both parts of the system also have different charged and partially charged atoms that need to match up well, too.
To make it even trickier, the total number of potential keys that could exist in the universe (the size of “chemical space”) is estimated to be about 10 to the 60th power (yes, that would be a 1 with 60 zeros after it!). Therefore, we’ll just focus on the types of keys that are somewhat similar to the types of molecules that have already become approved drugs.
Data from the experiments will then be made available to the public. How cool is that?
What we can accomplish with one year of calculations on World Community Grid could take us over one hundred years to achieve, using the resources we normally have available. Join the global online family and “GO Fight Against Malaria” with us.
Alex L. Perryman, Ph.D. is a research associate at The Scripps Research Institute.
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Editor’s Notes:
World Community Grid is fed by spare computing power from the nearly 2 million PCs that have been volunteered so far by 575,000 people in more than 80 countries. It gives each PC small computing assignments to perform when the devices aren’t otherwise being used by its owners, then sends the results to scientists seeking a faster way to cure disease, find renewable energy materials, create clean water techniques, or develop healthier food staples.
In 2006, 247 million people became infected with malaria — the leading cause of death in Africa for those under age five. According to the World Health Organization, malaria is both a disease of poverty and a cause of poverty; survivors are often subject to impaired learning, school absences, lost work, and increased economic distress. Where prevalent, the disease can account for 40 percent of all public health costs.
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