ACTION! ALERT | washingtonblade.com

Idle computers fight HIV
Donated time crunches data to develop new HIV drugs

By DYANA BAGBY
Jan. 20, 2006

GAY ACTIVISTS HAVE A SIMPLE NEW way to help fight the spread of AIDS: donating idle computer time to a global community of computers that will crunch data to find new HIV drugs.

By joining the World Community Grid, which links personal computers around the globe to create a “virtual super computer,” people donate their idle computer time to researchers who are hoping to significantly cut down on the time it takes to find chemical compounds against variations of a protein found in the HIV virus — one combination at a time.

“The computational challenges in approaching this problem are the vast number of possible mutations that may occur, and the huge number of possible chemical compounds that might be tested against them,” Arthur Olson, the project director of Fight AIDS at Home at the private Scripps Research Institute in California, said in a prepared statement.

“The new World Community Grid project will run millions upon millions of docking computations to evaluate potential interactions between compounds and mutant viral proteins,” he added.

FIGHT AIDS AT HOME joined with IBM and the World Community Grid in November to create the “virtual super computer” available to people around the world willing to donate their computers to participate in “grid technology” which allows for immense number-crunching tasks to be broken into small pieces for individual computers, explained Scripps spokesperson Keith McKeown.

“We’re very excited to be apart of IBM’s worldwide effort that benefits science and in dealing with HIV/AIDS in new ways,” he said.

“Normally, we would have to purchase a supercomputer to handle all the data, which is very costly and could take 100 years to handle all the data, but by joining the World Community Grid, we save money and time and hopefully will speed up the process in finding a cure.”

To help the project, computer users simply download a free software program from the World Community Grid that runs “in the background” on your computer, explained Catherine Collins, an IBM spokesperson. The Fight AIDS at Home client processes information and evaluates prospective candidates for drug discovery.

The program uses idle processor cycles that would otherwise go to waste, captures the wasted cycles of your computer and applies them to model the evolution of drug resistance and to design drugs necessary to fight AIDS, Collins said.

Computer models designed and tested via computers are also much quicker than the tedious task of testing millions of protein combinations to stop HIV in a traditional lab setting, according to project officials.

“When your computer has finished a Fight AIDS at Home computation, the Fight AIDS at Home results are packed up and sent back to the Scripps Research Institute, ready for Scripps researchers to collect and analyze them,” she explained.

The project is expected to take about a year.

MORE THAN 146,000 people and 240,000 computers have been enlisted to participate in the World Community Grid in the Fight AIDS at Home project, Collins said.

The World Community Grid, created to help in humanitarian science projects dealing with vast amounts of data, first found success as a virtual supercomputer by helping science with its Human Proteome Folding Project.

The grid technology enabled scientists to produce a database describing some 120,000 protein domains in about a year — a project that would have taken researchers about 100 years to complete with only their supercomputers, Collins said.