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With volunteer computing, large-scale computational problems are broken up into millions of small data packets and sent to individual participating computers. Home and business PCs, working while they sit idle, process and calculate these data packets and send the results back to a central system. There, the information is double-checked for accuracy and recombined to form a complex solution. This process differs from high performance computing, which processes data using a unified, massively parallel system.

One of the World Community Grid’s most recent projects, “Developing Dengue Drugs – Together,” illustrates the potential of combining grid computing with high performance computing systems, or ‘supercomputing,’ to speed the discovery of small molecules for drug development.

Led by Dr. Stan Watowich and his research team at The University of Texas Medical Branch, “Developing Dengue Drugs – Together” aims to find compounds to combat the family of viral diseases called flaviviruses, which include Dengue Fever, West Nile Virus, Hepatitis C and Yellow Fever. These diseases cause massive loss of life and resources throughout the world, with Dengue Fever infecting 50 to 100 million people each year and West Nile Virus spreading rapidly throughout the U.S. and Europe. There are no effective drugs to treat any of these diseases.

Flaviviruses are structurally and functionally similar and depend on a common enzyme, the NS3 protease, for viral replication. Knowing the shape and mechanism of this protease allowed Watowich’s research team to predict a method of disease disruption. But to test the three million potential drug molecules that could act as protease inhibitors was impossible given their on-site capacity.

“To do the drug discovery project in an accurate way would have required tens of thousands of years of computing time,” Watowich said. “So we talked with TACC and it became clear that a distributed computing approach would be very valuable. We decided to take advantage of what IBM had established and approached them about running our project on the World Community Grid.”

Using the free resources of the World Community Grid, more than 60,000 years worth of computing can be completed each year.

Watowich’s team used the Grid to do most of the computational heavy lifting, but performed pre- and post-processing, as well as algorithm and database testing, at TACC.

In Phase 2 of the Dengue discovery program, TACC will serve as the “mothership” for preparing, storing and processing all World Community Grid calculations. With the combined resources of TACC and the World Community Grid, the future of this type of approach is essentially limitless, Watowich said.

“Any disease, such as Alzheimer’s, influenza or asthma that has a protein target for the manifestation of the disease can be targeted with this approach,” he said.