TACC Partners with IBM’s World Community Grid to Speed Scientific Research 780,000 PCs are in use – Yours could be next!

Between keystrokes and without blinking an eye, you “TACC deploys world-class high performance com- can help solve the world’s most important problems. puting systems and other advanced computing resources, but does not provide a massive distributed This is the message behind the World Community serial computing grid. Therefore, we are pleased to Grid, the distributed computing network created partner with the World Community Grid, one of the by IBM, which, since 2004, has been harnessing the leading such projects in the world,” Jay Boisseau, power of volunteer computers to find cures for global director of TACC, said. “We look forward to work- health problems, understand climate change and dis- ing with IBM to explore how researchers can most cover the basic mechanisms of human health. effectively utilize both TACC advanced systems and the World Community Grid to address problems with “The idea is to tap into this vast computing power deep impact to society as well as science.” and put it together with scientists’ big research ideas to help society and the world by dramatically speed- (a type of “distributed” or ing up their research,” said IBM master inventor and “grid” computing) emerged in the 1990s as a way to chief scientist for the World Community Grid, Viktors solve complex problems computationally by connect- Berstis. ing large numbers of volunteer PCs over the . Drawing on the successes of SETI@Home — a popular Thanks to the World Community Grid’s 330,000 us- project begun in 1999 to help search ers, more than 120,000 years of computing time has the skies for signs of extraterrestrial life — IBM’s been dedicated to solving grand challenge problems. World Community Grid focuses on more terrestrial The World Community Grid — a massive virtual aims, like drug discovery, climate predictions and computer composed of 780,000 PCs and counting — bio-engineering. represents one of the largest philanthropic research projects ever attempted. The IBM Corporation is With volunteer computing, large-scale computational funding the project as a charitable program and has problems are broken up into millions of small data donated the hardware, software, technical services packets and sent to individual participating comput- and expertise to build and maintain the infrastructure ers. Home and business PCs, working while they sit for the World Community Grid. idle, process and calculate these data packets and send the results back to a central system. There, the The Advanced Computing Center (TACC) information is double-checked for accuracy and recently announced its partnership with the World recombined to form a complex solution. This process Community Grid and will assist the project by run- differs from high performance computing, which pro- ning World Community Grid software on its em- cesses data using a unified, massively parallel system. ployee PCs, installing the client on the new Stampede cluster –helping scientists scale their research for the One of the World Community Grid’s most recent World Community Grid – and allowing other large projects, “Developing Dengue Drugs – Together,” TACC clusters to run Grid computations when there illustrates the potential of combining grid computing are idle processors. with high performance computing systems, or ‘super-

Texas Advanced Computing Center | Feature Story For more info, contact: Faith Singer-Villalobos, Public Relations, [email protected], 512.232.5771 Page 1 of 2 computing,’ to speed the discovery of small molecules In Phase 2 of the Dengue discovery program, TACC for drug development. This method, called structure- will serve as the “mothership” for preparing, storing based drug discovery, uses the power of supercom- and processing all World Community Grid calcula- puters to determine which chemical compounds are tions. With the combined resources of TACC and the the most likely to lead to drug discoveries, then uses World Community Grid, the future of this type of grid computing to check the results. approach is essentially limitless, Watowich said. “Any , such as Alzheimer’s, , or asthma, Led by Dr. Stan Watowich and his research team at that has a target for the manifestation of the The University of Texas Medical Branch, “Developing disease can be targeted with this approach.” Dengue Drugs – Together” aims to find compounds to combat the family of viral called flavivi- The World Community Grid has already helped re- ruses, which include , , searchers complete several studies, including a com- , and Yellow Fever. These diseases cause parison of genomes and the development of tools for massive loss of life and resources throughout the early diagnostics. Presently, the Grid has four world, with Dengue Fever infecting 50 to 100 million active projects through partnerships with non-profit, people each year and West Nile Virus spreading rap- governmental, and academic institutions, searching idly throughout the U.S. and Europe. Currently, there for AIDS and Dengue drugs, and studying African cli- are no effective drugs to treat any of these diseases. mate change and human protein folding. The discov- eries facilitated by the Grid are made available to the Flaviviruses are structurally and functionally similar public to help the global research community. and depend on a common enzyme, the NS3 protease, for viral replication. Knowing the shape and mecha- Despite the World Community Grid’s achievements, nism of this protease allowed Watowich’s research there is still tremendous room for growth, according team to predict a method of disease disruption. But to Berstis. “One challenge is getting scientists to come to test the three million potential drug molecules that up with really big projects to help the world and hu- could act as protease inhibitors was impossible given manity,” Berstis said. “The other part of the challenge their on-site capacity. is getting the information out to all your friends and relatives and getting them to sign up.” “To do the drug discovery project in an accurate way would have required tens of thousands of years With the number of PCs in the world approaching of computing time. So we talked with TACC and it one billion, the World Community Grid has untold became clear that a distributed computing approach potential, leading many researchers to believe the would be very valuable,” Watowich said. “We decid- next big breakthrough might be achieved with the ed to take advantage of what IBM had established and help of your home or work computer. “It’s doing approached them about running our project on the something philanthropic without paying any money. World Community Grid.” Using the free resources of How often can you do that?” Berstis said. “Everybody the World Community Grid, over 60,000 years worth else asks for money, or time. Here’s something you of computing can be completed each year. can do to contribute to humanity and it’s effortless.”

Watowich’s team used the Grid to do most of the To join the World Community Grid, visit www. computational heavy lifting, but performed pre- and worldcommunitygrid.org and sign up to become a post-processing, as well as algorithm and database member. Making a difference has never been easier! testing, at TACC. “We’ve used TACC [systems] extensively for the initial development work, testing the programs on Lonestar and doing a lot of pre- processing to get the databases in the right format,” Watowich said.

Texas Advanced Computing Center | Feature Story For more info, contact: Faith Singer-Villalobos, Public Relations, [email protected], 512.232.5771 Page 2 of 2