WCG news update

[Black Panther]

Just got this on my facebook:

World Community Grid: There will be intermittent outages for the next 3 to 4 hours, while maintenance is being done to the website. Thanks for your patience!

Btw, if you got facebook make sure to join the official WCG facebook!

Here's the link.

[AlienIsGOD]

thnx Black. Already had it added to FaceBook along with the BioncStats App

[[Ion]]

Thanks Panther!
A perfect example of why a decent work buffer is a good idea!

[blkhogan]

True ^^ I upped my buffer on my 100% crunchers to 2 days. Ive got plenty to do if they are down for a bit.

[Chicken Patty]

This thread is good, let's keep it rollin' folks. Here of anything, post it up.

[theonedub]

I know a lot of us Crunchers spend more time looking at our stats or finding ways to push our rigs further rather than looking at WCG.org news and updates- I'm pretty guilty of it myself The purpose of this thread would be to post any project news, updates, or breakthroughs. I think that all of us would like to see how all that processing time translates to results!

To start it off:

Originally Posted by www.worldcommunitygrid.org

March 2, 2010

Researchers from the FightAIDS@Home project on World Community Grid have found a potentially new way to fight drug resistant strains of AIDS.

LINK: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ab...?articleId=122

What do you guys think?

[erocker]

Originally Posted by theonedub

What do you guys think?

AIDS sucks.




Really though, it's great to see something accomplished with all of this computing horesepower.

[jasper1605]

That's pretty sweet that our community's fun competition is leading to advancements like that Yay for folders

[ERazer]

nice

[blkhogan]

I was talking with my dad last night trying to explain what "crunching" is, I think he somewhat understands now. He wanted me to personally thank you guys for what you are doing. Who knows, maybe one of our returned WU was the one that helped him with his cancer treatment.

[Trigger911]

Originally Posted by blkhogan

I was talking with my dad last night trying to explain what "crunching" is, I think he somewhat understands now. He wanted me to personally thank you guys for what you are doing. Who knows, maybe one of our returned WU was the one that helped him with his cancer treatment.

I hope so.

[Chicken Patty]

I got this email from WCG definitely some good news

Dear Contributor/Innovator,

Just wanted to let you know how your donated computer cycles are helping improve the planet.

FightAIDS@Home:
Scripps Research Institute scientists recently found two compounds that will lead to new treatments for drug-resistant HIV strains
The Grid is also being used to conduct virtual screening experiments to develop a new class of HIV inhibitors
Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together - Phase 2:
The University of Texas Medical Branch has just launched an exciting project on the grid to identify promising drugs to combat Dengue and other related viruses
Phase 2 of the project is designed to reduce the number of Phase 1 false positives (i.e., dead ends)
As a result, Phase 2 will be much more productive, efficient, and rewarding
Sign up to contribute to this project!
Here is more information about FightAIDS@Home, Discover Dengue Drugs - Together - Phase 2, or other projects running on World Community Grid.

Thanks again for donating your computer time to help with these terrific projects. Please let a friend know about the World Community Grid - we need all the computing power we can get to keep doing this important work.


The World Community Grid Team

[theonedub]

This is the type of news I wanted this thread to be about: http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=117761

[Chicken Patty]

I got this email from WCG definitely some good news

Dear Contributor/Innovator,

Just wanted to let you know how your donated computer cycles are helping improve the planet.

FightAIDS@Home:
Scripps Research Institute scientists recently found two compounds that will lead to new treatments for drug-resistant HIV strains
The Grid is also being used to conduct virtual screening experiments to develop a new class of HIV inhibitors
Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together - Phase 2:
The University of Texas Medical Branch has just launched an exciting project on the grid to identify promising drugs to combat Dengue and other related viruses
Phase 2 of the project is designed to reduce the number of Phase 1 false positives (i.e., dead ends)
As a result, Phase 2 will be much more productive, efficient, and rewarding
Sign up to contribute to this project!
Here is more information about FightAIDS@Home, Discover Dengue Drugs - Together - Phase 2, or other projects running on World Community Grid.

Thanks again for donating your computer time to help with these terrific projects. Please let a friend know about the World Community Grid - we need all the computing power we can get to keep doing this important work.


The World Community Grid Team

[Chicken Patty]

posted it over there too! Maybe the threads can be merged?

[theonedub]

Good idea, make it happen captain

[Fitseries3]

me too!



soon as i get the SR-2 up and running i'll be full on

[Chicken Patty]

Ill see what I can do when I get home

[AlienIsGOD]

How does one up the buffer limit?

[Black Panther]

Originally Posted by AlienIsGOD

How does one up the buffer limit?

______________________________________________

Just got this from WCG facebook alert:

World Community Grid World Community Grid is experiencing technical difficulties, which is effecting the website. Thank you for your patience!

[Black Panther]

For the past four years, Lauren Moran has devoted herself to groundbreaking cancer research, chronicling the fickle interaction between molecules and proteins. Despite having a full-time job -- "stat geek" on the New York Yankees' media relations staff -- Moran screens drug candidates daily. And continuously. She conducts experiments while talking on the phone to her parents, attending games at Yankee Stadium, and watching episodes of The Office in her Bronx apartment. Even in the dead of night.

When she's not trying to cure cancer, she's busy cracking other monumental problems: AIDS. World hunger. Clean energy. It's a breathtaking portfolio for a 24-year-old communications major who didn't take a single chemistry or biology class in college.

Moran is a new breed of innovator: a citizen researcher on IBM's World Community Grid (WCG), an unprecedented effort to deploy ordinary people's idle computers to create a free, open-source lab for researchers around the globe. Massive computational research is broken down into discrete problems and distributed across a vast network. Since the tech giant launched the nearly $2-million-a-year project in November 2004, more than half a million people in 218 countries have volunteered some 1.5 million laptops and desktops. In raw computing power, the grid is comparable to a top-10 supercomputer. The average PC would take more than 328,000 years to complete the grid's calculations so far.

The grid, says researcher Alán Aspuru-Guzik, an assistant professor of chemistry at Harvard, "gives you the opportunity to do something nobody else has done. Something disruptive."

Moran's laptop displays a screen saver of her latest WCG assignment, but the science, she admits, is "way over my head. I just know when I'm not using my computer, it's crunching numbers that could lead to a cure."

Most of us use our computers about as efficiently as we use our brains: We scratch the surface, never tapping the full potential. WCG exploits this unused computing power by borrowing -- with the owner's permission -- a machine's central processing unit to do some serious math. It works unobtrusively, when you aren't working. You download software that takes advantage of any break, from a phone call to a pause while you're thinking of what to type next. The instant your fingers touch the keys, the calculations cease.

At IBM, a full-time staff of seven -- dispersed across the country, from Beaverton, Oregon, to Austin -- makes sure that the projects' individual applications are running smoothly, that the grid is assigning work and returning results to the appropriate lab, that problems aren't cropping up in the online member forums, and that software for upcoming projects is being vetted.

Using this powerful new tool, AIDS researchers at Scripps Research Institute are generating new drug leads to combat the growing strains of drug-resistant HIV. French scientists are learning more about the proteins behind muscular dystrophy. (Partly because of that project, the lead researcher, Alessandra Carbone, was recently named the "Woman Scientist of the Year" by the French government.) Scientists at the University of Washington are compiling a comprehensive map of rice proteins, which could help developing countries grow more nutritious, higher-yield crops. A team led by the Cancer Institute of New Jersey used the grid to develop algorithms that identify subtle signatures in digitized cancer tissues that could lead to early, accurate, and rapid detection; the results convinced the National Institutes of Health to award the team $2.5 million to expand the database.

WCG, which hosted one project its first year, now runs a half dozen or more simultaneously. The latest: In hopes of discovering new organic electronic materials that could lead to cheaper solar cells, Aspuru-Guzik is screening about 2 million chemical compounds for photovoltaic properties. That's roughly 20,000 times more compounds than he could analyze on a single computer. And the project will take only a couple of years, instead of two decades.

"We're opening up the field of bioinformatics," says Robin Willner, IBM's vice president of global community initiatives, including WCG. "There's nothing else out there like this."

"Looking for aliens is great, but let's cure cancer"
Many companies run in-house grids on their employees' machines, but a network of WCG's size and scope wasn't feasible until recently. "Back in the '70s, we were thinking, What if we could do this?" says Viktors Berstis, a 33-year IBM veteran and WCG's chief scientist. Divvying up data processing to the public around the planet wasn't practical until enough computers were connected to the Web, connections were high speed, and machines' processors were powerful enough to hammer through dense algorithms rapidly.

Continue reading.....

[Chicken Patty]

Thanks BP. Ill read this later when I get home but seems interesting.

[Chicken Patty]

My net has been down lately so sorry if this is a repost.


Dear Chicken Patty,

World Community Grid is pleased to announce that as a result of the generous contribution of computing power from our members, the Nutritious Rice for the World project finished on April 6, 2010.

Now that the first step is finished, stay tuned to learn what insights the researchers find as they analyze the data.

For more information please go to News and Updates.

We still need your help with six (6) other ongoing projects! World Community Grid continues to run the following projects: FightAIDS@Home, Help Conquer Cancer, Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy - Phase 2, Help Fight Childhood Cancer, Human Proteome Folding - Phase 2, and Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together, Phase 2. All of these important projects need your computer time.

If you only had Nutritious Rice for the World selected for active projects, then you will start receiving work from the other active projects. To modify your project selection criteria, please go to your My Projects page.



The World Community Grid Team

[theonedub]

WCG Related News

03 May 2010

Dr. Alessandra Carbone named "Woman Scientist of the Year"

Category: Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy - Phase 2
Tags: Video and Media

Summary
Dr. Alessandra Carbone, Principal Investigator for the Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy project, was recently honored as "Woman Scientist of the Year".


Dr. Alessandra Carbone, professor at Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC) and Principal Investigator for the Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy project, was recently honored as "Woman Scientist of the Year" by the jury of the 9th Irène Joliot-Curie Prize from the French Department of Higher Education and Research. To read more about this great award, click here for the French version and here for the English version.

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ab...?articleId=129

[theonedub]

10 May 2010

Help Conquer Cancer project publishes paper

Category: Help Conquer Cancer
Tags: Publications and Presentations

Summary
The Help Conquer Cancer project researchers have developed an image-analysis and classification system for automatically scoring images from high-throughput protein crystallization trials.


Non-technical abstract:

The structure of cancer related proteins is important to know because their shape determines their function and role in the disease process. These proteins are usually large, so the only way to determine their structure is using x-ray crystallography. What makes this exceedingly time consuming is the necessary first step of getting the protein to crystallize. To do this, the scientists mix in varieties of compounds in the hope that this will help spur the crystallization of the protein. Using robots, many thousands of crystallization attempts are made. To determine if a crystal actually formed requires human observation and this is very time consuming.

By using World Community Grid, the scientists were able to developed an automated system for analyzing the images of the crystallization attempts and recognizing whether crystallization occurred. They have already trained the system to successfully recognize 80% of crystal-bearing images and eliminate 98% of clear drops. This significantly reduces the time required for human inspection, which should lead to much faster structure determination of proteins under study.

Eventually this should lead to a better understanding of the role of certain proteins in cancers and other diseases, which in turn should lead to identifying better treatments for these diseases.

Technical Abstract:

We have developed an image-analysis and classification system for automatically scoring images from high-throughput protein crystallization trials. Image analysis for this system is performed by the Help Conquer Cancer (HCC) project on the World Community Grid. HCC calculates 12,375 distinct image features on microbatch-under-oil images from the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute’s High-Throughput Screening Laboratory. Using HCC-computed image features and a massive training set of 165,351 hand-scored images, we have trained multiple Random Forest classifiers that accurately recognize multiple crystallization outcomes, including crystals, clear drops, precipitate, and others. The system successfully recognizes 80% of crystal-bearing images, 89% of precipitate images, and 98% of clear drops.

Journal that the paper appeared in: Journal of Structural and Functional Genomics.