Communications of the ACM
Tackling Tuberculosis sing Crowd-Sourced Supercomputer
Researchers at the University of Nottingham are using IBM's World Community Grid to study tuberculosis.
Credit: AnconMedical.com
University of Nottingham researchers are launching a new study to address tuberculosis (TB) using IBM's World Community Grid, one of the most powerful and fastest virtual supercomputers in the world.
Launched on March 24, 2016, the Help Stop TB project will model aspects of the behavior of TB bacteria to better understand its potential vulnerabilities that new medicines may one day exploit.
Volunteers are being asked to make the processing power on their personal devices available to perform the millions of calculations necessary for these simulations. Crowdsourcing a virtual supercomputer in this way will provide results significantly faster than relying on conventional computational resources.
"My team will use World Community Grid to help science better understand the TB bacterium, so we can develop more effective treatments, and eventually eradicate this threat to human health," says Nottingham professor Anna Croft.
The Help Stop TB project researchers will use the computer power donated by World Community Grid volunteers to simulate the behavior and chemical properties of mycolic acids to better understand how they protect the TB bacteria.
"Thanks to World Community Grid's massive computational power, we can study many different mycolic acid structures instead of just a few," Croft says.
From University of Nottingham (United Kingdom)
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2016 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
No entries found