Multinational technology corporation IBM have come up with a way to allow people who use their systems to help in the fight against Ebola. This has been done by developing software that enabled users to donate processing time on their PCs, tablets and phones to Ebola researchers.
IBM joined scientists at Scripps Research Institute in southern California to find a way to combine the processing powers of thousands of small computers to each work on tiny parts of the Ebola medical puzzle, which otherwise might take a supercomputer to solve. Erica Ollmann Saphire, a researcher at Scripps, believes this plan will allow them to find the answer in months, instead of years.
This plan utilises what we call ‘distributed computing’, an idea that isn’t new. IBM have a been a sponsor of the World Community Grid for the last 10 years, a project that does what the Ebola project aims to do. Volunteers taking part in World Community Grid download software that uses unused processing capacity on their devices. This project already has about 680,000 individuals taking part and has helped research into AIDS, cancer, malaria and the environment. For more information on this program and to download the software, go to their website [http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/].
This kind of software that utilises unused processing capacity is designed to only be used when the device is idle and connected to the internet. At all other times it is not in use, so it doesn’t slow down devices. Users can specify if they want their device to connect to the grid automatically or if they want to choose the times themselves. The grid computing software breaks down huge computing problems into lots of smaller tasks, which are then assigned to individual devices and the results are compiled for the researchers to use.
Saphire, the researcher at Scripps, has been researching Ebola for 11 years and identifies two ways in which the grid program can help: it can help analyse various compounds to see which might be able to attack the vulnerable spots of the virus that she has identified, and, in the long term, it can help understand how Ebola proteins change form over time.
So far, major international pharmaceutical companies have not been investing heavily in research to fight Ebola because it is primarily in less-developed countries, so research is heavily funded by donations and government funding. This grid project allows regular people to join the fight and give researchers like Saphire the help they need to get rid of this virus for good.