2008-04-01

GRID - Distributed Computing against the AIDS, the Cancer and other sickness



There are sickness that the human race hasn't well understood yet and for that thousands people, every year, die relentlessly.
There are politics interests, economic interests and sometimes social interests that block the researches intent to take their jobs over there, where it's necessary.

Then, there is the informatics, that is the power to make today in 1 second what I've done yesterday in 10 years.

The distributed calculation is base essentially upon this paradigm where some specific needings can be directed upon computers to reach a great results. Times ago there was big complex computers , where the big computation jobs where solved, but today, ladies and gentlemen, there is a small softwarine of about 10 Mb!

It's name is GRID, or BOINC, and it's capable to distribute computation, that should employ thousands of "clock years" to be executed, to many machines displaced all around the world.

Thanks to that, the World Community Grid Project , try to utilize all this possibilities to allow the American Universities (and more..) to formulate hypothesis about the evolution of a Cancer Cell or a virus like AIDS(HIV) if submitted to some treatments.

In easy words the reseraches studies configure the GRID, and the rest of the "world" execute all the computing operations to return an aproximately fast result....
Here it is a statistic of the actual numer of registered users "engaged" in the fight for survival:


But there are some Technical matters that must be cleared:
Before everything, GRID runs upon every known system (from Win 98 to Vista to Linux), but the main characteristic is that it doesn't slow down in any way your computer.
In fact it downloads from the net small chunks of calculation to compute, and during te "IDLE" clocks of the system, it solves them.

But, what's an IDLE Clocks?
Essentially they are moments during the time that the processors doesn't anything; because there isn't inside a machine the function "don't do anything", the processor execute void operations waiting to return operative.
If , for example, I execute 4 or 5 programs but this programs don't continuosly elaborate operations, the processor execute also many IDLE operations; think about when you use a Word processor and you wait some time to think what you have to write... inside this seconds your computer process automatically fake operations, but...
...thanks to GRID this operations can be used for the followings tasks:

  1. Cancer Research
  2. AIDS Research
  3. World Overheating
  4. other..


Registration waste only 4 minuts, installation included. Once you have registered you can decide what's your preferred research for your Idle clocks (but also all togheter...).
You will gain points and partecipate to a classification of the bests.

What to say , if you have a PC, internet, and many Idle clocks, why don't you help the future children and anyone of us ?

I wait for you...

Software Link: - World Community GRID -

Lord Hol Napult

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