NEWS-INDIA: Crack complex science problems with home PCs: Indian American

[Frederick Noronha <fred@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Crack complex science problems with home PCs: Indian American

By Ela Dutt, India Abroad News Service

New York, Dec 13 - An Indian American academic at Stanford, along with one
of his graduate students, has proved that people using their home computers
can help scientists solve complex mathematical problems.

Vijay Pande, assistant professor of chemistry at Stanford, and his student
Michael Shirts explain as much in their article on "distributed computing,"
published in the latest issue of the reputed journal Science.

"A handful of projects have already demonstrated how such large-scale
distributed computing power can be utilized," writes Pande.  This method of
computing has already become an invaluable and inexpensive tool for
astronomists, biochemists and other scientists.

One example Pande uses to prove his point is SETI@home, a Berkeley-based
system now being used by some half a million home computer users to help in
the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). By downloading SETI
software and screensaver, these home computers can constantly process radio
signals and deliver the results to the Berkeley headquarters.

"This large number of processors dwarfs even the largest supercomputers,"
say Shirts and Pande. In just three years, this system has done what a
single computer would have taken 400,000 years to do, they contend.

"There are at least 300 million personal computers on the Internet," Pande
and Shirts point out, and 90 percent of all PC processing time is wasted, an
untapped reservoir of computing power worldwide. According to their
estimates, even if only half of all current PCs with an Internet connection
participated in distributed computing, the capacity could accomplish 300
SETI-sized projects.

"Perhaps the most exciting possibility, however, is in the biological
realm," say the authors. "In the last few years, the huge amount of raw
scientific data generated by molecular biology, structural biology and
genomics has outstripped the analytical capabilities of modern computers,"
they write.

Pande told the Stanford news, "The exciting thing about distributed
computing right now is that there are a lot of interesting biological
questions that are at the moment too difficult for single computers," for
example protein folding, on which Pande and his laboratory team have done
extensive research.

About two months ago, Pande launched Folding@home, an Internet program to
calculate how proteins reach their three-dimensional shape. Pande and his
team have some 10,000 volunteers already. But it is not enough to have the
volunteers or the computers, Pande emphasizes, "It's like giving someone
100,000 secretaries," he says, adding "What you need is a way to organize
these guys and come up with ways that you could actually use all the
secretaries. Otherwise, you end up wasting them."

Volunteers have to be willing to put in the labor however, he warns. At the
same time, it gives ordinary science buffs or others access to science as
never before. "The involvement of hundreds of thousands of nonscientists in
research opens the door to new means of science education and outreach, in
which the public becomes an active participant," they contend.