Fight cancer with your computer

It sounds a little fantastical doesn’t it? But researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a new technology that allows people to do exactly that.

Let us step back a little first. What does your computer do for the majority of the day? The vast majority of computer users don’t work on particularly resource intensive projects, so their machines simply sit relatively idle, performing only the most basic of computations required. There are millions of such machines out there, and they can potentially constitute a massive resource in the aid of scientific research.

What changes the rules of the game is Distributed Computing, which basically allows different computers communicating over a network ( in this case the internet) to work towards a common goal. The most popular of these is the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing ( BOINC).

By putting all these idle computers to work, researchers can tap into a vast amount of computing power. Presently, there are 2.5 million computers registered on the BOINC network. Only 10 per cent of the users are online and constitute a combined computing power of 8,723 TeraFLOPs. To put things in perspective, that means that this network, while operating at 10 per cent capacity, would be faster than the world’s fourth fastest supercomputer.

BOINC uses this incredible computing power to solve some of the world’s most pressing issues: Seti@ home aids in the search for alien life in outer space, Folding@ home studies protein folding and that can potentially change the way many diseases are treated, including cancer.

You can download and register your computers on the BOINC network by going to: http:// boinc. berkeley. edu/

Now when you go to sleep, you can rest easy, knowing that your computer is out there, fighting cancer, malaria, a host of other diseases you may not even know of.