World Community Grid

Overview
World Community Grid (WCG) is an effort to create the world's largest public computing grid to tackle scientific research projects that benefit humanity. Launched November 16, 2004, it is funded and operated by IBM with client software currently available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and FreeBSD operating systems.

Using the idle time of computers around the world, World Community Grid's research projects have analyzed aspects of the human genome, HIV, dengue, muscular dystrophy, and cancer. The organization has so far partnered with over 350 other companies and organizations to assist in the work and has over 345,000 registered user accounts.

History
IBM and other research participants sponsored the United Devices Smallpox Research Grid Project to accelerate the discovery of a cure for smallpox. The smallpox study used a massive distributed computing grid to analyze compounds' effectiveness against smallpox. The project allowed scientists to screen 35 million potential drug molecules against several smallpox proteins to identify good candidates for developing into smallpox treatments. In the first 72 hours, 100,000 results were returned. By the end of the project, 44 strong treatment candidates had been identified. Based on the success of the Smallpox study, IBM announced on November 16, 2004 the creation of World Community Grid with the goal of creating a technical environment where other humanitarian research could be processed.

World Community Grid initially only supported Windows, using the proprietary Grid MP software from United Devices which powered the grid.org distributed computing projects. Demand for Linux support led to the addition in November 2005 of open source BOINC grid technology which powers projects such as SETI@home and Climateprediction. Mac OS X and Linux are now officially supported.

As of January 6, 2008, World Community Grid had 345,000 registered user accounts with over 864,000 registered computers. Over the course of the project, over 134,000 years of computing time have been donated and over 144 million workunits have been completed. 

How it works


The World Community Grid software uses the idle time of Internet-connected computers to perform research calculations. Users install WCG client software onto their computers. This software works in the background, using spare system resources to process work for WCG. When a piece of work or workunit is completed, the client software sends it back to WCG over the Internet and downloads a new workunit. To ensure accuracy, the WCG servers send out multiple copies of each workunit. Then, when the results are received, they are collected and validated against each other.

Users may choose to use graphics outputted by the current workunit as a screensaver. If using the Grid MP client, users may also opt to run the research software only when in screensaver mode.

While many public computing grids such as SETI@home and Folding@home are devoted to a single project, World Community Grid offers multiple humanitarian projects under a single umbrella. Projects are approved by an advisory board, with members from many major research institutions and universities, as well as the U.S. federal government and WHO. Users are included in all projects by default, but may opt out of projects as they choose.

World Community Grid also differs from other grid projects by offering support for more than one grid infrastructure. The open source BOINC client is available for all supported platforms. The proprietary Grid MP client from United Devices, which is now being phased out, is only available for Windows.

Even though WCG makes use of open source client software, the actual applications that perform the scientific calculations are closed source. Keeping the scientific applications closed source provides security through obscurity &mdash; that is, it is more difficult to intentionally or unintentionally transmit false or inconsistent results to WCG if the mechanism for creating the results is not known.

Potential problems
Because the World Community Grid software increases CPU usage by consuming unused processing time, it is possible for the software to cause abnormal behavior on volunteered computers. Despite the unobtrusive nature of the software, decreases in system performance could still occur. High CPU usage could also cause a computer to overheat. To prevent these issues, by default the Grid MP software will not push total CPU usage above 60%. This feature is not yet available for the BOINC client. If the BOINC client's CPU usage is set to 60%, however, it will work at 100% for 3 seconds, then at 0% for 2 seconds, in approx. per member's client CPU type and other conditions though, resulting in an average decrease of processor use.

Running under UD client and if abnormal behavior on volunteered computer is being persistent, participating Member is able to pause or snooze its process temporary for maximum 120 minutes, take out from "Start up" listing ( of Microsoft Windows), or uninstall WCG client software itself. WCG client software task execution program on Microsoft Windows is "WCGrid_AutoDock.exe" and it is said that some malware camouflage themselves as WCGrid_AutoDock.exe.

Statistics and competition
The contributions of each user are recorded and user contribution statistics are publicly available. Due to the fact that the processing time of each workunit varies from computer to computer depending on the difficulty of the workunit, the speed of the computer and the amount of idle resources available, contributions are usually measured in terms of points. Points are awarded for each workunit depending on the effort required to process that workunit.

Upon completing a workunit, the BOINC client will request the number of points it thinks it deserves based on software benchmarks (see BOINC Credit System). Since multiple computers process the same workunit to ensure accuracy, the World Community Grid servers can look at the points claimed by each of those computers. The WCG servers disregard statistical outliers, average the remaining values and award the resulting number of points to each computer.

If the Grid MP client is used, points are awarded slightly differently than with BOINC. A computation is made taking into account benchmarks, amount of RAM, and available hard disk space. The resulting value is then limited to no more than twice the points that the World Community Grid Comparison Device would receive for the same workunit.

Within the grid, users may join teams that have been created by organizations, groups, or individuals. Teams allow for a heightened sense of community identity and can also inspire competition. As teams compete against each other, more work is done for the grid overall.

Outreach
World Community Grid recognizes companies and organizations as partners if they promote WCG within their company or organization. As of March 2, 2008, WCG had 376 partners. 

Also, as part of its commitment to improving human health and welfare, the results of all computations completed on World Community Grid are released into the public domain and made available to the scientific community.

In the fall of 2006, IBM sponsored an online and print advertisement campaign for WCG. Print advertisements appeared in Exceptional Parent, Ability Magazine, Forbes magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Fortune magazine.

FightAIDS@Home
FightAIDS@Home was World Community Grid's second project and its first to target a single disease. Each individual computer processes one potential drug molecule and tests how well it would dock with HIV protease, acting as a protease inhibitor. Scripps Research Institute published its first peer-reviewed scientific paper about the results of FightAIDS@Home on April 21, 2007. This paper explains that the results up to that point will primarily be used to improve the efficiency of future FightAIDS@Home calculations.

Human Proteome Folding Phase 2
Human Proteome Folding Phase 2 (HPF2) was the third project to run on World Community Grid. This project, following on from HPF1, focuses on human-secreted proteins, with special focus on biomarkers and the proteins on the surface of cells as well as Plasmodium, the organism that causes malaria. HPF2 generates higher-resolution protein models than HPF1. Though these higher-resolution models are more useful, they also require more processing power to generate.

Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together


Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together is sponsored by scientists at the University of Texas and the University of Chicago and will run in two phases. Phase 1, launched August 21, 2007, will use AutoDock 2007 (the same software used for FightAIDS@Home) to test potential antiviral drugs against viruses from the family flaviviridae. Phase 2 "will use a more computationally intensive program to screen the candidates that make it through Phase 1." The drug candidates that make it through Phase 2 will then be lab-tested.

AfricanClimate@Home
This project will be "much more refined than the BBC Global climate study."

Help Conquer Cancer
The Help Conquer Cancer project is sponsored by the Ontario Cancer Institute (OCI), Princess Margaret Hospital and University Health Network of Toronto, Canada. The project involves X-ray crystallography.

Human Proteome Folding Phase 1
The first project launched on World Community Grid was the Human Proteome Folding Project, or HPF1, which aims to predict the structure of human proteins. This project was unique in that computation was done in tandem with the grid.org distributed computing project. Devised by Richard Bonneau at the Institute for Systems Biology, the project used grid computing to produce the likely structures for each of the proteins using a Rosetta Score. From these predictions, researchers hope to predict the function of the myriad proteins. This increased understanding of the human proteins could prove vital in the search for cures to human diseases. Computing for this project was officially completed on July 18, 2006. Research results for the yeast portion of HPF1 have been published.

Help Defeat Cancer
The Help Defeat Cancer project seeks to improve the ability of medical professionals to determine the best treatment options for patients with breast, head, or neck cancer. The project worked by identifying visual patterns in large numbers of tissue microarrays taken from archived tissue samples. By correlating the pattern data with information about treatment and patient outcome, the results of this project could help provide better targeted treatment options.

Genome Comparison
The Genome Comparison project is sponsored by the Brazilian research institution Fiocruz. The project seeks to compare gene sequences of different organisms against each other in order to find similarities between them. Scientists hope to discover what purpose a particular gene sequence serves in a particular function of one organism, via comparing it to a similar gene sequence of known function in another organism.

Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy Phase 1
Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy Phase 1 was run by Décrypthon, a collaboration between French Muscular Dystrophy Association, French National Center for Scientific Research and IBM, and it investigated protein-protein interactions for 40,000 proteins whose structures are known, with particular focus on those proteins that play a role in neuromuscular diseases. The database of information produced will help researchers design molecules to inhibit or enhance binding of particular macromolecules, hopefully leading to better treatments for muscular dystrophy and other neuromuscular diseases. This project was available only to agents running the Grid MP client, making it unavailable to users running BOINC.

Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy Phase 2
Phase 2 of the Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy project will start in early 2008. While Phase 1 only ran on the Grid MP platform, Phase 2 will run on the BOINC platform.