The company’s most recent Corporate Responsibility Report, now available, details not only the company’s own environmental stewardship, but discusses projects such as The Clean Energy Project at Harvard University, which is seeking novel, organic molecules that can underpin cheaper and more efficient solar cells.

IBM’s World Community Grid, which provides scientists with free computing power harvested from the idle PCs of volunteers, has enabled Harvard to discover a new compound for solar cells that might one day be painted inexpensively and easily on windows and roofs. The Harvard team is using World Community Grid to automate and accelerate the screening 3.5 million molecules — chemistry’s biggest set of quantum calculations ever.

IBM believes that collaboration with academia, government, private enterprise and the general public  is the key to better environmental research — and a Smarter Planet.

Below is a video that outlines the latest developments as part of The Clean Energy Project.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: energy, IBM, solar, world community grid

Jason Hlady leads the World Community Grid team at the University of Saskatchewan

When Jason Hlady sees a computer that is turned on but not being used, just sitting there, idling away, he can’t help but think of the possibilities…

That dormant machine could, at that very moment, be running computations to help cure cancer or fight AIDS. It could be solving algorithms that might lead to clean water solutions, or reduce world hunger, or accelerate any number of other worthy research projects.

Hlady, a high performance computing coordinator at the University of Saskatchewan, wants to cut waste and tap the potential of idle computers across the university. To that end, he is leading the drive to get faculty and staff to connect to the World Community Grid — a global network that pools unused computing power and repurposes it for humanitarian research.

As leader of the university’s World Community Grid team, Hlady encourages colleagues to install software that connects their computers to the grid and runs research computations on the machines when they are on, but idle.

“When a computer sits idle, all that energy is just going up a smokestack,” Hlady said. “By joining the World Community Grid, we’re able to put otherwise wasted computing power to good use, helping solve some of the major problems facing our world today.”

Recruiting computers across campus

Hlady’s efforts began nearly two years ago when the University of Saskatchewan became an official World Community Grid partner, committed to support and contribute computing resources to this cause. To date, the university has donated over 250 compute years — about half a year each day — toward humanitarian research via the grid.

“We’ve really just scratched the surface of what we can contribute,” Hlady said. “Just wait until we start to add large labs and entire departments to the grid.” Hlady hopes to boost student involvement as well.

Eventually, the university’s grid team may engage in friendly team challenges with other teams around the world to see which one returns the most results or generates the most run time in a given time period. “If good natured competition can boost enthusiasm for the grid, I’m all for it,” Hlady said.

High praise for grid partnership

For Hlady, becoming an official World Community Grid partner is a smart move for the university any way you look at it.

“Number one, the research being done on the grid is top quality and involves pursuing lofty goals for the betterment of the world — and we want to support that,” Hlady said. “Plus, the projects are targeted and peer reviewed, which is not the case with all public grids.”

“Second, we get experience and develop expertise with BOINC, the open source framework on which most grid and volunteer computing initiatives are built,” he said.

“Third, we think that it’s important to lead by example and show that publicly funded universities can be responsible with their resources,” Hlady said. “By connecting to the grid, we waste less electricity and maximize use of our computing assets.”

A real sense of satisfaction

Hlady runs the grid software on all seven computers in his home and office (connecting to the grid is strictly voluntary for anyone in the university community). His enthusiasm for the grid derives from a passion for research and science that goes back to grade school.

“There’s a real sense of satisfaction in enabling good research,” Hlady said. “Sometimes it’s very difficult to feel like you can make any sort of difference in the world when we’re facing such huge problems. But by contributing to the grid, you can make a real impact.”

Hlady encourages institutions of every stripe to become a grid partner.

“If you make this resource available and show people how easy it is to set things up, they’ll run with it,” he said. “The World Community Grid is a positive thing to be involved with for any organization. There’s really no downside whatsoever.”

World Community Grid pools the surplus computer processing power of more 1.8 million PCs registered by over 570,000 people in 88 countries to tackle projects that benefit all of humanity, like fighting childhood cancer, developing clean energy solutions or designing better treatments to fight AIDS. Volunteers simply download free, secure software that runs quietly in the background when their computer isn’t in use and crunches numbers for humanitarian research initiatives. In terms of pure processing power, the grid is comparable to one of the world’s top fifteen supercomputers.

To read more World Community Grid Person for a Smarter Planet posts, click here.

Technorati Tags: BOINC, Jason Hlady, University of Saskatchewan, volunteer computing, world community grid

Igor Jurisica, Ph.D, uses the power of World Community Grid to conduct his cancer research.

When Igor Jurisica started doing cancer research 11 years ago, he worked with about a dozen colleagues using a handful of scientific workstations in a small lab in Toronto, Canada.

How times have changed.

Today, Jurisica, a senior scientist at Princess Margaret Hospital, Ontario Cancer Institute, conducts his research with the help of nearly 300,000 people spread across 100 countries running his calculations on over 900,000 devices.

This global “team” comprises volunteers who donate their idle computing time to the World Community Grid, creating a virtual supercomputer devoted strictly to humanitarian research. Jurisica’s project, Help Conquer Cancer, is one of nine initiatives that currently share the grid’s massive computing power — free of charge — to conduct critical scientific inquiry.

Jurisica’s research involves computationally intensive calculations to understand the protein crystallization process in general, with a special focus on the structure and function of cancer-related proteins. With conventional computing resources, this project would take at least 186 years to complete.

By using the grid, Jurisica will be able to finish it in just under four years.

“World Community Grid has not simply sped up this research, it has enabled it,” Jurisica said. “The grid has completely transformed the scope of our work and enabled us to finally address our problem in the correct way, in a realistic time frame.”

Visionary cancer research, viable at last

Help Conquer Cancer uses World Community Grid to analyze protein crystals and help improve researchers’ understanding of cancer biology.

Jurisica is using World Community Grid to analyze and classify 115 million images of more than 12,500 human proteins. Each image, created through a process known as x-ray crystallography, displays unique features that must be carefully annotated.

“No human would be able to go through this number of images in a consistent way and accurately classify them,” Jurisica said. ”The grid is the only environment where we can even attempt to do this kind of comprehensive and systematic analysis.”

The results of this project will expand researchers’ understanding of the crystallization process, protein biochemistry and cancer biology and potentially help determine an individual’s predisposition to certain cancers. It may also help improve therapy planning, treatment prognosis and drug development.

Supercomputing power without supercomputer costs

For institutions using World Community Grid, it’s a dream come true: they get all the computational power of a supercomputer without the prohibitive costs and enormous responsibilities.

“Even if somebody gave me Blue Gene or some other machine that could sustain this kind of computation, it’s not feasible because I wouldn’t have the space, power, cooling capacity or the staff necessary to maintain it,” Jurisica said. World Community Grid’s distributed computing model eliminates the headaches of operating a centralized system and lets Jurisica do what he cares about most: focus on his research.

“With the grid, some machines may go offline, new ones will come online, and our computations might move from machine to machine,” Jurisica said. “But I don’t have to concern myself at all with that level of detail.”

Cycling for a cure

When Jurisica is not conducting research, supervising graduate students, traveling to conferences, lecturing or consulting, he likes to go cycling. Since 2008, he has ridden in the annual Ride to Conquer Cancer — a 2-day, 200-mile bike ride from Toronto to Niagara Falls. His IBM-OCI-Roche Integrative Discovery cycling team has raised over C$250,000 for cancer research to date.

“I signed up for my first ride not because I was regularly bicycling, but because of the cause,” Jurisica said. “But since then I have come to love cycling and I’ve even changed my lifestyle to some degree.”

Each summer, Jurisica participates in a 2-day, 200-mile bike ride to raise funds for cancer research.

With his current grid-based research scheduled to wrap up later this year, Jurisica is looking ahead to the next phase of his project, which he hopes to continue running on the grid.

“As a computer scientist, I have great interest in developing new approaches and resources to do complex data analysis and visualization,” Jurisica said. “But it’s really gratifying when this research eventually leads to a clinical test that can hopefully start changing the lives of actual patients. That’s what this is all about.”

World Community Grid pools the surplus computer processing power of more than 1.8 million PCs registered by over 570,000 people in 88 countries to tackle projects that benefit all of humanity, like fighting childhood cancer, developing clean energy solutions or designing better treatments to fight AIDS. Volunteers simply download free, secure software that runs quietly in the background when their computer isn’t in use and crunches numbers for humanitarian research initiatives. In terms of pure processing power, the grid is comparable to one of the world’s top fifteen supercomputers.

To read more World Community Grid Person for a Smarter Planet posts, click here.

Technorati Tags: cancer research, help conquer cancer, Igor Jurisica, protein crystallization, world community grid, x-ray crystallography

Kevin Reed, an IBM IT architect, has played a central role in developing and running World Community Grid

By Richard Silberman, Writer/Researcher, IBM Communications

As a child, Kevin Reed was surrounded by scientific research, growing up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, home to one of the U.S. government’s largest national laboratories. Clearly it made quite an impression. Today, as an IBMer in the Midwest, Kevin is devoted to helping make groundbreaking research possible in some of the key humanitarian fields of our time — and to involve potentially millions of ordinary citizens in the effort.

Kevin has spent the past seven years helping build and run World Community Grid, IBM’s volunteer computing initiative that pools unused processing power (PC downtime) donated by computer users worldwide and makes it available to public and not-for-profit research initiatives. Kevin and his team are helping accelerate visionary research on AIDS, muscular dystrophy, world hunger and more.

“This program allows researchers to look at many problems more extensively and complete research quicker than they ever could with conventional cluster computing resources,” Kevin said. “Plus, it engages the public in scientific research in a way where they are actually participating in it and making a real difference.”

Once a fan, now a force in volunteer computing

Kevin joined the World Community Grid project in 2004, months before launch, as the Web site lead developer. He was a perfect fit for the job as he had been interested and active in volunteer computing for years, participating in both SETI@home and grid.org.

Today, Kevin, an IT architect, leads the team responsible for the project’s infrastructure and Web site. He works closely with the open source software that volunteers run on their computers — known as Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing — and, essentially, makes sure the grid is up and running properly. Kevin is also responsible for forecasting — and making sure the grid can handle — future growth.

Currently, that growth averages 120 new volunteers daily. A respectable rate, but just a start, as Kevin sees it.

“We have half a million registered users, but we’d like to expand that tenfold,” Kevin said. “Every computer is important. The donated computing time adds up and increases our ability to complete important research.”

Tapping into tablets and smartphones

Along with growing the grid’s volunteer base by millions, Kevin is particularly excited about the potential of drawing idle processing time from an explosive range of new handheld devices to increase the grid’s computing capabilities.

“Tablets and smartphones are starting to reach the point where they can do significant computations,” Kevin said. “In two to three years these devices could become powerful contributors to the grid — for instance, when you come home at night and plug your cell phone into the wall.”

Dedicated to making a difference

Seven years into the grid project, Kevin’s commitment to it only grows — as does his enthusiasm.

“We are getting real results now and I am really looking forward to the point where there may someday be a New York Times headline saying the World Community Grid helped cure cancer,” Kevin said. “Being able to say that I was a part of that will be a truly fantastic moment.”

Every grid volunteer, in fact, will be able to claim some credit for the many breakthroughs to come. After all, that’s what the grid is all about.

“Anyone who wants to help create a smarter planet, this is a great way to do it,” Kevin said. “Helping create this virtual supercomputer out of processing time that would otherwise be wasted — and to use it for the good of mankind — is definitely a smarter way of doing things.”

Technorati Tags: humanitarian research, virtual supercomputer, volunteer computing, world community grid