As many long time readers know, our resident black-hat blogger, G-man, survived several bouts of cancer over the last few years. Last week, I received an email from him asking if we could mention one of the most fantastic resources available for helping in the fight against the disease - World Community Grid. Their projects include:
- Helping to Cure Muscular Dystrophy - Investigating protein-protein interactions for 40,000 proteins whose structures are known, with particular focus on those proteins that play a role in neuromuscular diseases.
- Fiocruz Genome Comparison - Comparing genomic information to improve the quality and interpretation of biological data and our understanding of biological systems, host-pathogen and environmental interactions.
- Human Proteome Folding - obtain higher resolution structures for specific human proteins and pathogen proteins and further explore the limits of protein structure prediction.
- Fighting AIDS - using computation methods to identify candidate drugs that have the right shape and chemical characteristics to block HIV protease.
They also recently (in April of 2007) completed cancer research into Tissue Microarrays to determine how to improve the treatment of cancer with earlier and more targeted diagnostic tools.
Of course, after G-man pinged me, I downloaded the program and installed. The software is fascinating because it actually shows your progress and contributions:
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The stats show that widespread adoption has yet to be achieved. I can't see why there aren't millions of members by now:
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Hopefully, you can help out not only by downloading the software, but also by spreading the message. If you've ever been part of a family or friend circle that includes someone facing these diseases, you can empathize with the need for this research.
UPDATE: SEOmoz now has a team set-up on World Community Grid! Go download the program and join team SEOmoz FTW! and help use your powers for good (or awesome).
Why dont we create a team and use our marketing know-how to build a huge network...
Join the "SEO" team...
Great Idea!
Everybody join the new Team I just created "SEOmoz FTW!" Let's see how badass The Moz can be when we all pool our extra computing power together.
That's awesome...Distributed computing for protein analysis.
These guys definitely need to get the word out. I did cancer research for the VA for about 5 years and never heard of this site! Imagine all the VA computers nationwide running this app....
Yeah, its pretty awesome stuff, and nice to see people using technology for something that can atucally benefit mankind as well instead of the usual rubbish. Thanks for sharing Rand.
They need to harness the power of the PS3's processor now!
https://tinyurl.com/ywab77
Downloaded this a while ago and was part of a team, but lost the proggy in a big reinstall... will have to have another go :) Its certainly a good cause, and seeing as the machine sits there at home, on, while i'm at work, its all good :P
Great cause and well worth contributing to. I'll be checking out the site at my first opportunity and downloading.
That's a great idea, we can use our online presence to help spread the word and effort of millions of people around the world doing good for humanity:
I made a post a few days ago on a related subject:
Online marketing with a purpose
You can take the link out Rand if you consider it convenient.
Thanks for the information Rand, I'll be posting about it. We can do good with online marketing.
I'm going to download this--thanks. If anyone wants to include me as part of their team, just let me know. I'd be happy to help.
Join the SEOmoz Team!
Rand, how is G-Man?
We normally use our collaborative voices to advocate to the world’s leaders on the fight against terrorism, corruption, poverty and global disease. Today, I was doing some reading that made me think we might be able to use our collective computing power as well for the betterment of humanity. If you own a fast computer and are not running memory intensive applications, then you could take the initiative by allowing the community grid service applications to run even when your machine is not idle. You don’t have to do anything extra with this application; neither do you need to be tech savvy, you just need to let this application run of its own. You can carry on with your own tasks but in reality you will be a step closer to solving one of the problems facing humanity.
https://www.askdrtech.com/
I'm on board...I had been meaning to sign up for a similar service for a while now. I think this should be a requirement for anyone who owns a computer.
It should be pre-bundled in PCs instead of useless programs that no one ever uses.
Great stuff; I love grid computing, and this is a pretty amazing application. I played around with it yesterday and joined the SEOmoz team. Note to people concerned about bog-down on their machine: you can also set a schedule for it to run on. I set it to run 10PM-8AM, so it's not tying up resources while I'm working. It also runs in a screensaver mode, processing while your machine is idle.
Yeah, the PS3 seems like an excellent machine for folding!
I read a very interesting article today about a cheap inexpensive possible cure for cancer, that a university can't get funding to research because it's so inexpensive that there's no profit to be made from it; certainly worth a read!
Scientists cure cancer, but no one takes notice
Very nice tip! I am specially happy to know we have a Brazilian project also on that list. I'll download and try to spread the word. I hope other readers will do the same.
Thanks for mentioning that, and I will give it some link love.
Over the weekend I wrote this article about SEO and volunteering and I hope if people like it they will share this as well.
This is great. I lost a cousin to MD about 10 years ago. They've been so close to finding a cure for a long time. Hopefully a few extra teraflops cycling through their data will help them discover what they've been looking for. Thanks for the tip Mozland!
This is like SETI@home but for proteins, very cool.
I was just going to ask to see if it was going to piggbank on BOINC anytime soon. In between searching for aliens and trying to help Al Gore with the climate change modeling, I'd love to get into this project rolling.
They don't exactly advertise it, but they do support BOINC. However it looks like the MD project isn't on the BOINC platform. I haven't found any official instructions, but there's a post in their BOINC agent support forum that comes close.
If you go the BOINC route, there are several other projects that deal with proteins - Rosetta@Home, Predictor@Home, Tanpaku, and some others. They all take slightly different angles on the problem. And if proteins aren't your thing, there are lots of other projects to choose from. A couple of sites that compile stats, and give you a little info on the projects:
Toby's BOINC Stats - you get a one line description of the projects on the front page, but the list isn't comprehensive.
BOINCstats.com - This lists a ton of projects, but you've got to click the project, then click on its banner to get to its site, so you can then read about the project. Don't be surprised if this site is slow - his stats importer process is pretty intensive.
It appears to have allowed me to sign up to all four programs via BOINC.
Bonus! The signup page on their site seemed to indicate it was only available on the United Devices client.
I installed the BOINC client but signed up via the link Rand posted. I then opened the BOINC client and input the address and username etc. in there and it all worked by magic(TM).
This is an amazing application - I have registered and am downloading as we speak. Thank you for sharing, previous to this I used SETI.
I'm just trying to get it going now - for Ubuntu users, it looks like you can install the application via Synaptic: BOINC install.
While I completely support the effort, just a word of warning...
Some computers aren't designed to run at 100% processor utilization for long periods of time. I used to run Seti@Home on my computers and then realized after having problems with two laptops that the load it put on the computers was the likey cause of my problems.
I'd guess applications like these would be fine for servers, workstations, and even tower computers and business-class desktops. But just be careful with smaller, low-power computers like laptops or 'desktop' computers such as the Mac Mini which don't have adequate fans to cool a processor that's running all the time.
You can customize your settings through WCG to state the maximum capacity you want your computer to run at.