• PC World
• »Tech Industry

With $1 million in philanthropic backing from industry giant Intel, some of the architects of the popular SETI@home distributed computing project set out today to enlist millions of PC owners in the search for cancer cures.

The project, dubbed the Intel Philanthropic Peer-to-Peer Program, enables individuals to download an application that will apply their PC's unused processing power to a key cancer problem.

"We hope to recruit 6 million users to download the software over the next year," says Pat Gelsinger, vice president and chief technical officer of the Intel Architecture Group in Beaverton, Oregon.

"At that number, their machines will have collective processing power equivalent to a 50-terraflop supercomputer running day and night," he says. "That's ten times bigger than the world's largest existing supercomputer assembled for less than one percent of the cost."

One terraflop equals a trillion floating-point computations per second.

The initiative is being managed by United Devices, an Austin, Texas-based distributed computing company. David Anderson, the firm's chief technology officer, is director of the SETI@Home project and was one of its architects while at the University of California at Berkeley.

Cycles for Charity

SETI@Home, the largest existing distributed computing project, pools more than 2.3 million PCs worldwide to search recorded radio signals for signs of intelligent life in space.

Other similar projects in which users can donate unused cycles to charity include those run by Entropia, a distributed processing company in San Diego; Folding@home, a protein-folding project run out of Stanford University; and Folderol, which investigates data from the Human Genome Project.

"People who volunteer for this kind of project are mostly interested in good works and being a part of something larger than themselves," says Ed Hubbard, chief executive officer of United Devices. "Our software replaces the idle loop in your processor with a scientific calculation, so you can do something worthwhile without it costing you anything."

The Intel-sponsored initiative will focus initially on seeking drugs to block four key proteins that promote human cancers, including childhood leukemia. Volunteers' computers will screen through a library of 100 million compounds, calculating whether any of them are likely to bind to the proteins.

The calculations will also predict whether the compounds could be readily absorbed by cells. Those compounds that pass the initial computer-simulated screening will go on to actual testing in a lab.

"This technology allows us to do the initial screening efficiently and focus our lab work only on compounds that have a high likelihood of being useful," says Sujuan Ba, science director of the National Foundation for Cancer Research, which is assisting in the trials.

The Bethesda, Maryland-based foundation sponsors the work of Graham Richards of Oxford University, a British scientist in computational drug design who designed the scientific portions of the project.

Download to Donate

When you download the 1.8MB client software from the Intel site and install it on your PC, it places an icon in the system tray at the lower right of the screen and loads automatically each time the computer is rebooted. You can set the application to run all the time in background, or only as a screen saver.

The application downloads a group of compounds for screening whenever the PC is connected to the Internet. It then performs the required computations and uploads the result back to the United Devices server the next time the computer is online.

Aside from their charitable work, companies like United Devices and Entropia are trying to make a profit from distributed computing.

United Devices, for example, is working on two paid projects for which it has recruited some 10,000 to 20,000 volunteers who take part in sweepstakes and giveaway programs as payment, Hubbard says. However, if you don't enroll in any of those programs, your computer's cycles will be used only for charitable work.

Intel's Gelsinger says the cancer problem is only the first challenge to which the distributed computing network will be applied. Once that project is completed, perhaps in about a year, the group will be looking for other large, computationally intensive scientific problems to pursue.

From Intel's point of view, the project makes excellent use of the company's new Pentium 4 processors, which have more power than is required to run most business desktop applications anyway.

The client application is optimized for Pentium processors, and specifically the P4, Intel says, but will run on any Windows platform. Because it kicks in only during the idle loop of the processor, it should not cause noticeable degradation of performance even if left to run continuously.

But for those who worry about this issue, Gelsinger says, the software can be set to run only as a screen saver when the computer has been idle for a while.

"Instead of rendering flying toasters, let's start applying those unused cycles to attacking some fundamental problems of mankind," says Gelsinger. "Then when I buy a faster machine, I'll have the satisfaction of knowing that it's not just running games and 3D programs faster, it's donating more to science."