Daulton and a
couple of
others posted on this very important topic before and I thought it should be revisited today.
You can now easily help fight AIDS at home with your computer.
Find out how below the fold.
All you have to do is download and install a program from the
World Community Grid. It works by using your computer's spare processing power to process data for possible AIDS treatments.
Here are two news links featuring this project:
MSNBC
Anyone who wants to participate can find out how by logging on to the World Community Grid. "The more people who come on the grid, the more important research can be done," says Stan Litow, vice-president of corporate community relations at IBM (IBM), which is a lead organizer of both the community grid and the FightAIDS@Home project. "Everybody can be a philanthropist."
Snip...
At Scripps, Olson heads an initiative that has been running for 12 years aimed at coming up with novel drug therapies in the face of the development of resistance by HIV to existing drugs. Using a software program, scientists feed in information about target proteins that they want to inhibit and small molecules they're testing as inhibitors to determine how well the molecules will fit into the proteins.
Researchers originally used individual computers and analyzed one pairing at a time, then later harnessed a small, 1,000-computer grid. "This is a big deal for us," says Olson. "It speeds things up by a factor of 100."
CNET
The nonprofit World Community Grid project, unveiled by IBM last year, successfully completed one scientific feat already: the Human Proteome Folding Project. That venture, carried out in collaboration with the Institute of Systems Biology over a 1-year period, could produce a database of approximately 120,000 protein structures. The supercomputer at the institute would have taken more than 100 years to complete the same work.
Here are some more facts about the World Community Grid.
- So far there are 123,331 volunteers helping fight AIDS (we have 13 people on the Daily Kos team so far).
- In 2003, with grid computing, in less than three months scientists identified 44 potential treatments to fight the deadly smallpox disease. Without the grid, the work would have taken more than one year to complete.
And here are some facts about AIDS.
- At least 2.8 million people will have died of AIDS this year alone (that's over 5 people every minute).
- Young people (15-24 years old) account for half of all new HIV infections worldwide - more than 6,000 become infected with HIV every day.
- Africa has 12 million AIDS orphans.
- More than 25 million people have died of AIDS since 1981.
- About 40.3 million people will be living with HIV/AIDS by the end of this year.
- By the end of this year women will account for 46% of all adults living with HIV worldwide, and for 57% of the adults living with it in sub-Saharan Africa.
Joining the team
After you install the program from the World Community Grid you can join the Daily Kos team by doing the following:
1. click here which takes you to our team's page, and then click on the "join this team" you see there.
It's that easy.
More information can also be found through the following links.
FightAIDS@Home
The official FAQ