Ashish Patel

Got a very intriguing e-mail today, its included below. Also, an update to my stats:

• Registered: September 22, 2005
• Run Time: 477 days
• Points: 394,264
• Results: 1,623

World Community Grid is pleased to announce that the Help Defeat Cancer (HDC) project is finished. The last work units have been sent out and when the final results are returned, the project will come to an end. This project, which launched on July 20, 2006, will have run for just over 9 months by the time the last results are returned. During this time 88,000 members will have donated 2,900 years of computer time on 138,000 different computers. This is a significant contribution to cancer research.

But the end of this project is really only a beginning. Based on the results, the researchers who are working on this project have a very aggressive plan to make Tissue Microarray technology an integral part of early cancer detection. World Community Grid’s team will keep in close touch with the research team and will post updates on the website in the Research pages. The researchers will also continue to update their HDC website with exciting updates about this project and the inroads it is making on cancer research.

On behalf of the research staff at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, World Community Grid’s team wish to express our thanks to you for contributing your PC power to this project. With your contribution, this project was completed in a fraction of the time it would otherwise have taken.

We also want to inform you that World Community Grid has started work on a new cancer project to discover ways to accelerate the crystallization process used in studying cancer protein structure using X-ray Crystallography, which will help researchers identify proteins involved in cancers and lead to new drug therapies and cures. We plan to launch this new cancer project in the May/June 2007 time frame. You will receive more information on this project prior to the official launch date.

We still need your help with other ongoing projects! World Community Grid continues to run the FightAIDS@Home, Genome Comparison, Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy and Human Proteome Folding - Phase II projects. These critical research projects need your computer time as well.

Again, thank you for your contribution to the highly successful completion of the Help Defeat Cancer project!

A little update on my participation on the World Community Grid project. I’ve been running one of my desktops at work on the project for over a year now and the progress is looking quite impressive.

Each project has unique minimum requirements. If your computer does not meet the minimum requirements for a project, you will not receive work from that project. I have been involved in the following projects:

• FightAIDS@Home
• Genome Comparison
• Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy
• Help Defeat Cancer
• Human Proteome Folding 2

My statistics from the day I started this project include solving 1511 results and accumulating over 350000 points, ranking me a mere 8790 in the project. So much for being number one I strongly encourage anyone with an idle computer to join the program and put that computing power to bettering mankind!

So who would think being a computer geek could mean helping the world fight AIDS? Usually when you think of the people fighting AIDS or Cancer you think of doctors and laboratory researchers. Times have change…

You may recall from a previous post that I became a contributor to the Human Proteome project on the World Community Grid. On the 1-year anniversary of the World Community Grid, which was sometime in the past week, the FightAIDS@Home project was launched.

UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, estimated that in 2004 there were more than 40 million people around the world living with HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. The virus has affected the lives of men, women and children all over the world. Currently, there is no cure in sight, only treatment with a variety of drugs.

Even more challenging, HIV is a “sloppy copier,” so it is constantly evolving new variants, some of which are resistant to current drugs. It is therefore vital that scientists continue their search for new and better drugs to combat this moving target.

Scientists are able to determine by experiment the shapes of a protein and of a drug separately, but not always for the two together. If scientists knew how a drug molecule fit inside the active site of its target protein, chemists could see how they could design even better drugs that would be more potent than existing drugs.

To address these challenges, World Community Grid’s FightAIDS@Home project runs a software program called AutoDock developed in Prof. Olson’s laboratory. AutoDock is a suite of tools that predicts how small molecules, such as drug candidates, might bind or “dock” to a receptor of known 3D structure. The very first version of AutoDock was written in the Olson Laboratory in 1990 by Dr. David S. Goodsell, while newer versions, developed by Dr. Garrett M. Morris, have been released which add new scientific understanding and strategies to AutoDock, making it computationally more robust, faster, and easier for other scientists to use. AutoDock is used on the World Community Grid to dock large numbers of different small molecules to HIV protease, so the best molecules can be found computationally, selected and tested in the laboratory for efficacy against the virus, HIV. By joining forces together, The Scripps Research Institute, World Community Grid and its growing volunteer force can find better treatments much faster than ever before.

I really love the whole idea of using idle time on a computer (ie. the screensaver) to do something useful for the rest of the world. I’ve been a member since 9/22/2005, so only a few months now. However, I’ve already racked up some major scores:

Activity Summary
	My Accumulated Points:	73,177
	My Team:	IBM Toronto Software Lab

Detailed Statistics
	Statistics Last Updated:	11/23/2005 12:06:02 (UTC) [1 hour(s) ago]–> Totals:     Total Run Time (y:d:h:m:s) (Rank) 0:086:19:24:09 (#21,418)   Points Generated (Rank) 73,177 (#15,694)   Results Returned (Rank) 394 (#12,033) Averages:     Avg. Run Time Per Calendar Day (y:d:h:m:s) 0:001:09:04:12   Avg. Run Time Per Result (y:d:h:m:s) 0:000:05:17:16   Avg. Points Per Hour of Run Time 35.12379   Avg. Points Per Calendar Day 1,161.53968   Avg. Points Per Result 185.72843   Avg. Results Per Calendar Day 6.25397 Miscellaneous:     Last Result Returned (UTC) 11/23/2005 10:27:23 [3+ hour(s) ago]   Device Installations 2 Team History and Statistics Team Name Status Joined-Retired Team Name (y:d:h:m:s) Points Generated Results Returned IBM Toronto Software Lab 09/22/2005 - Current 0:085:11:22:19 72,071 389

It has been about 2 weeks since I joined the World Community Grid program and have been contributing over 15 hours of my computing resources a day to help the Human Proteome Project.

World Community Grid’s mission is to create the world’s largest public computing grid to tackle projects that benefit humanity.

When idle, your computer will request data on a specific project from World Community Grid’s server. It will then perform computations on this data, send the results back to the server, and ask the server for a new piece of work. Each computation that your computer performs provides scientists with critical information that accelerates the pace of research!

So why did I decide to participate? Well I realized that my dual Intel Pentium 4 3.2 GHZ workstation isn’t always being utilized to its maximum potential. I ran a program that evaluates the capbility of your computer (from the aspect of computing horsepower, disk space, memory, etc) to benchmarks. Apparently mine rated 183 as compared to 100 (which is a high-end workstation).

The thing is that as you volunteer your computing resources you get points for every protien that you process. I have collected over 12K points.

I suggest that if you have unused computing power, please lend it to the greater good of mankind! To start, you download and install a small program or “agent” onto your computer.