Friday, 16 May 2008

IBM Tackle’s Rice Crisis with Grid “Supercomputer”

As concerns of a global hunger crises mount, IBM and researchers at the University of Washington today launched a new program to develop stronger strains of rice that could produce crops with larger and more nutritious yields.

With the processing power of 167 teraflops, equivalent to the world’s Top 3 supercomputer, IBM’s World Community Grid aims to harness the unused and donated power from nearly one million individual PC's in a new initiative --"Nutritious Rice for the World" project -- that will study rice at the atomic level and then combine it with traditional cross breeding techniques used by farmers throughout history.

Jumpstarted by a 2 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation, the project could enable rice-producing countries to become more immune to future climate changes because they can quickly find the right plants for cross breeding, and create “super hybrids” that are more resistant to changing weather patterns.

“The world is experiencing three simultaneous revolutions: in molecular biology and genetics; in computational power and storage capacity; and in communications. The computational revolution allows scientists around the world to tackle almost unimaginably complex problems as a community, and in real-time,” said Director General Robert Zeigler, International Rice Research Institute, which is based in the Philippines.

“While there are no silver bullets, rice production can be revitalized with the help of new technologies. The world community must invest now and for a long time to come.”

World Community Grid will run a three-dimensional modeling program created by computational biologists at the University of Washington to study the structures of the proteins that make up the building blocks of rice.

Understanding the structure is necessary to identify the function of those proteins and to enable researchers to identify which ones could help produce more rice grains, ward off pests, resist disease or hold more nutrients. In the end, this project will create the largest and most comprehensive map of rice proteins and their related functions, helping agriculturalists and farmers pinpoint which plants should be selected for cross-breeding to cultivate better crops.

“The issue is that there are between 30,000 and 60,000 different protein structures to study,” said Principal Investigator, Dr. Ram Samudrala, Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Washington.

“Using traditional experimental approaches in the laboratory to identify detailed structure and function of critical proteins would take decades. Running our software program on World Community Grid will shorten the time from 200 years to less than 2 years.”

World Community Grid is fast approaching its own milestone, expecting to hit next week, as the grid reaches one million registered computers helping to advance scientific research. Each week, thousands of people sign on to this project that has significantly advanced several research projects on diseases like cancer and AIDS. The nutritious rice project is the latest to utilize the grid, and could have a major impact on global health.

“This project could ultimately help farmers around the world plant better crops and stave off hunger for some,” said Judy Lee, Manager of Corporate Citizenship at IBM Singapore.

“People who want to be a part of something big can take a small step today by donating their unused computer time. Volunteers can personally effect how quickly this research is completed and can make a significant difference for farmers and people in great need.”

Anyone with a computer and Internet access can be a part of the solution. To donate unused computer time, individuals register on

print

save

email

comment