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Volunteering Computers for Science

October 20, 2009
by Jeremy Singer-Vine
Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Jeremy Singer-Vine

The next cure for a major disease is as likely to be discovered on a computer as on a laboratory bench–and scientists are enlisting ordinary citizens to volunteer to help crunch the data.

Advances in computer science have enabled medical researchers to test how proteins fold, genes interact and pandemics spread in complex digital simulations of natural environments. As these simulations become more intensive and widely used, however, computers at academic institutions and other research facilities can’t keep up with the demand for medical processing power.

Instead, scientists are tapping into a vast network that allows the research to be parceled out in tiny workloads that can be performed on anyone’s household computer when it’s not otherwise being used.

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