IBM’s grid put to use tackling rice shortage
By Erna Mahyuni
IBM’s making good use of its World Community grid to figure out solutions for food shortages in the world - specifically for rice.
The World Community Grid site announced the Nutritious Rice for the World project - run by the University of Washington’s Computational Biology Research Group, Seattle, Washington, USA.
What does the project angle to achieve? According to the announcement:
“The mission of the Nutritious Rice for the World project is to predict the structure of proteins of major strains of rice. The intent is to help farmers develop better rice strains with higher crop yields, promote greater disease and pest resistance, and utilize a full range of bioavailable nutrients that can benefit those people in regions where hunger is a critical concern.
For those who haven’t heard of the World Community grid, it’s an IBM-sponsored project to ‘create the world’s largest public computing grid to tackle projects that benefit humanity’. Basically it entails computers working together on a grid by contributing small percentages of their CPU Run Time to endeavours like Nutritious Rice.
Nutritious Rice is the tenth research product launched on the Grid, one of six currently active. The other five active research projects are:
- Help Conquer Cancer (launched November, 2007)
- AfricanClimate@Home (launched August, 2007)
- Discover Dengue Drugs – Together (launched August, 2007)
- Human Proteome Folding - Phase 2 (launched July, 2006)
- FightAIDS@Home (launched November, 2005)
To be a part of the World Community Grid Endeavor, you just need to register, then download and install the required small program or “agent” onto your computer.
That agent then works to use your computer’s idle time to perform computations on data, sending the results back to the grid server.
According to the site, “Each computation that your computer performs provides scientists with critical information that accelerates the pace of research!”
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