fightAIDS@home Team Makes Progress Against HIV Protease & Integrase

[Inchlingblue]

I know that some of us on these forums are part of the World Community Grid's fightAIDS@home team. It's nice to read that all that donated computer time is paying off. They discovered two new compounds that prove the existence of new binding sites on HIV protease. This paves the way for newer and better drugs, maybe even some that can skirt around resistance. They also recently announced important discoveries surrounding HIV's integrase. "By producing a more accurate model of integrase, the research allows further searches for new drug molecules that will inhibit the mutant drug resistant forms of this enzyme, as well."

Utilizing computing power from 1.5 million devices networked through IBM's ( IBM) World Community Grid, the new sites on the HIV protease are being used as docking targets for virtual screening experiments, in order to guide the development of these chemical compounds into a new class of potent HIV inhibitors.  Using the massive computational resources of the World Community Grid, the FightAIDS@Home team has already docked over 500,000 compounds against these newly characterized binding sites.

By aggregating the unused cycle time of 1.5 million personal computers donated by volunteers in over 80 countries, World Community Grid is now the world's largest public humanitarian grid, equivalent in power to a Top 15 supercomputer, and crunched more than 107,000 years of computational time in just 5 years for the Scripps Research Institute project, providing more than 104 million calculations.

"The FightAIDS@home project will continue to run calculations to further this research against drug-resistant mutant 'superbugs' of HIV.
 
To donate your computer cycle time to humanitarian research covering areas from cancer to more nutritious rice to more efficient energy sources, please visit: www.worldcommunitygrid.org.  From this site you can install a small, safe, and secure program that will connect you to the grid.  When your computer is idle, data is requested from World Community Grid's server to perform a computation.  Once finished, the result is sent back to the server, prompting it for a new piece of work.  It is not necessary to leave a computer on more than usual and we encourage members to continue their normal routines.  We can harvest substantial computational power during a normal work day just by taking advantage of the time when someone is on the phone, talking with colleagues, taking a coffee break or doing simple tasks that don't require the full power of the computer."

LINKS:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100203172849.htm

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/two-compounds-discovered-that-pave-the-way-for-new-class-of-aids-drug-85830882.html


www.worldcommunitygrid.org

[Tim Horn]

We posted this a few weeks ago:

AIDS Research, at Home

[WillyWump]

I know that some of us on these forums are part of the World Community Grid's fightAIDS@home team. It's nice to read that all that donated computer time is paying off. They discovered two new compounds that prove the existence of new binding sites on HIV protease. This paves the way for newer and better drugs, maybe even some that can skirt around resistance. They also recently announced important discoveries surrounding HIV's integrase. "By producing a more accurate model of integrase, the research allows further searches for new drug molecules that will inhibit the mutant drug resistant forms of this enzyme, as well."

Utilizing computing power from 1.5 million devices networked through IBM's ( IBM) World Community Grid, the new sites on the HIV protease are being used as docking targets for virtual screening experiments, in order to guide the development of these chemical compounds into a new class of potent HIV inhibitors.  Using the massive computational resources of the World Community Grid, the FightAIDS@Home team has already docked over 500,000 compounds against these newly characterized binding sites.

By aggregating the unused cycle time of 1.5 million personal computers donated by volunteers in over 80 countries, World Community Grid is now the world's largest public humanitarian grid, equivalent in power to a Top 15 supercomputer, and crunched more than 107,000 years of computational time in just 5 years for the Scripps Research Institute project, providing more than 104 million calculations.

"The FightAIDS@home project will continue to run calculations to further this research against drug-resistant mutant 'superbugs' of HIV.
 
To donate your computer cycle time to humanitarian research covering areas from cancer to more nutritious rice to more efficient energy sources, please visit: www.worldcommunitygrid.org.  From this site you can install a small, safe, and secure program that will connect you to the grid.  When your computer is idle, data is requested from World Community Grid's server to perform a computation.  Once finished, the result is sent back to the server, prompting it for a new piece of work.  It is not necessary to leave a computer on more than usual and we encourage members to continue their normal routines.  We can harvest substantial computational power during a normal work day just by taking advantage of the time when someone is on the phone, talking with colleagues, taking a coffee break or doing simple tasks that don't require the full power of the computer."

LINKS:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100203172849.htm

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/two-compounds-discovered-that-pave-the-way-for-new-class-of-aids-drug-85830882.html


www.worldcommunitygrid.org

This is great news Inch! I've had this running on my puter for over a year (cool screensaver), and it's nice to see it actually paying off  

btw, it shows my "work Done" is 20196.41 and my "avg. work done" is 63.40. I have no clue what that really means, but I guess it's doing something

-Will

[Inchlingblue]

I hope more people sign up.

I've had it running for about a year also. My Work Done is 30184.46 and my Avg. Work Done is 102.82

I guess those numbers represent time spent online computing?

[Okealyshire]

The World Community Grid is one of several projects based on open-source grid computing software known as BOINC (SETI@home, which you also might know of, uses the same software). Grid computing is one of the most continually active areas of computer science research.

"Work done" and "avg. work done" indicate your computer's contribution to whatever computation projects you've connected to. Credit determination follows a convoluted but entirely appropriately geeky algorithm based roughly on the power of your computer and the time it devotes to project computation. Work done, also called "total credit," is the total amount of processing time you've contributed. Average work done, also called "recent average credit," is your daily average. The unit of measurement is a Cobblestone, described in the article I linked earlier. As I said, it's geek-to-the-max.

[Inchlingblue]

Thanks Okealyshire.