Tuesday, November 06, 2001

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Washington Business Journal Celera strikes deal with Parabon to improve efficiency

"Celera is utilizing a novel approach to bioinformatics to speed up its proteomics research.

The Rockville-based company is using Frontier, a proprietary technology, to harness computer power while the computers are shut down, in sleep mode, or being used for other applications."

" Through Frontier, Celera can tie together its employees' computers so that they all work on large-scale, proteomic sequencing. Frontier detects when a computer has idle capacity, and therefore room, to work on a research application. Such capacity could be available even when a person is using his or her computer during everyday tasks."

redux [04.04.01]
BioMedNet Intel supports online protein project
[requires 'free' registration]

"Intel is providing equipment and software downloads for a project in which volunteers are donating spare home computer cycles to a Stanford University project studying the protein-folding process. The project, Folding@Home, was the first to model successfully a complete protein fold - a task not even achieved by supercomputers."

""We want to increase the value of the PC," said Scott Griffin, Intel's program manager. "The PC is there when people aren't at it, like when they are in meetings. A great thing about this is you get every day users involved in research that they care about. Not only do they get to help out, but they get to help cure these terrible diseases.""

redux [09.23.01]
Wired News The Little Screensaver That Could

"IBM is spending $100 million building the world's fastest supercomputer to do cutting-edge medical research, but a distributed computing effort running on ordinary PCs may have beaten Big Blue to the punch.

IBM's proposed Blue Gene , a massively parallel supercomputer, in hopes to help diagnose and treat disease by simulating the ultra-complex process of protein folding.

"But Folding@Home , a modest distributed computing project run by Dr. Vijay Pande and a group of graduate students at Stanford University, has already managed to simulate how proteins self-assemble, something that computers, until now, have not been able to do."

redux [08.29.01]
Nature: Science Update Parasite corrals computer power

"According to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings (disguised as mice) are using us to compute The Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, And Everything. Now earthling scientists have roped unsuspecting web servers into a similar - albeit slightly less ambitious - exercise in parasitic computing.

Using the Internet itself as a computer, Jay Brockman and colleagues at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, have solved a mathematical problem with the unwitting assistance of machines in North America, Europe and Asia."

EyeForPharma Novartis evaluates Entropia's distributed computing technology for accelerating drug discovery

""The vast quantities of data involved in the genomic era of drug discovery are quickly outpacing advances in computing technology," said Robert North, Entropia CEO. "Distributed computing allows companies to cost-effectively access the massive computing power they'll need by using their existing PC networks. It's quite exciting that companies like Novartis are deploying our platform to demonstrate the potential of distributed computing as a valuable tool in drug discovery efforts.""

redux [10.09.00]
ACM CrossRoads The SETI@Home Problem

"The SETI@Home problem can be thought of as a special case of the distributed computation verification problem: "given a large amount of computation divided among many computers, how can malicious participating computers be prevented from doing damage?" This is not a new problem. Distributed computation is a venerable research topic, and the idea of "selling spare CPU cycles" has been a science fiction fixture for years."

"The Internet makes it possible for computation to be distributed to many more machines. However, distributing computing around the internet requires developers to consider the possibility of malicious clients."

"The general study of secure multiparty computation has produced much interesting work over the last two decades. Less well studied, unfortunately, are the tools and techniques required to move the theoretical results to the real world. The old dream of massively distributed computations is finally coming true, and yet our tools for building and analysing real systems still seem primitive. The challenge of the next few years will be to bridge this gap."