Cure cancer during your coffee break, crack protein folding while you're at lunch, evaluate AIDS drugs as you chat on the phone. Every time you step away from desk, your computer sits idle, but network your humble PC with thousands or millions of others through the Internet and a virtual supercomputer emerges. This is the power of distributed, or peer-to-peer (P2P), computing, and the potential benefits of using this spare computing power means that researchers are vying for the use of your PC.
The latest P2P project—a collaboration between Oxford University's Centre for Computational Drug Discovery, the National Foundation for Cancer Research, distributed computing specialist United Devices and Intel—aims to find drug candidates for treating leukemia. The project's program THINK runs as a screen saver and tests binding interactions between selected target proteins, including superoxide dismutase and vascular endothelial growth factor, against a bank of small molecule drug candidates. Interactions are logged and sent back to the researchers for follow-up, reducing millions of potential drug leads to around 200,000 candidates.
Project-leader Graham Richards, Chairman of Chemistry at Oxford University, claims that even if using a traditional supercomputer, "a researcher could not hope to see a project like this completed during their lifetime." But to succeed, the general public must download and run the software. Richards says that the response so far has been "absolutely staggering". In the first week of the project, 200,000 individuals have signed up, and software downloads have at peak times reached three per second. This has already allowed the team to increase the number of drug candidates they plan to screen from 250 million to 800 million.
Other P2P networks aimed at combating disease include Entropia's FightAIDS@home, and Intel plans to develop similar programs for Parkinson disease and diabetes. Richards put the success of THINK down to simple program design which participants can easily understand, and perhaps more importantly to peoples' personal connection with cancer. "One in four people throughout the world contract some form of cancer, so nearly everyone will have a relative, friend or colleague who has suffered, or is suffering from the disease. People now have the opportunity to make a positive impact on the disease by donating their unused computer power," he says.
