The World Community Grid - Helping Researchers With Your Computer

[jul059]

Hello to everyone!

 

I thought winter was already over in Quebec... It looks like it isn't! They predict -19 °C for tomorrow night.... damn...

 

Anyway, this reminded me of what a great potential we have in North America to freely contribute to research! Let me explain : Heating is, in some parts of Canada, done with electricity or a combination of electricity and gas. In each case, heat is generated by a different physical process. As you certainly know, gas is burned in an exothermic redox reaction. It is actually pretty hard from a thermodynamic perspective to do anything else with it : the efficiency of an internal combustion engine (generation mechanical energy) is at most ~30-32 %, and very efficient gas turbines don't surpass 65 % efficiency. In engineering terms, we say that thermal energy is a "low quality" energy.

 

Electricity is different : it is essentially the highest quality of energy that we know of. Converting electricity to anything is always theoretically efficient. Take for example an electrical motor (electricity to mechanical) which can surpass 95 %, or the good old lightbulb which is essentially 100 % efficient in converting electricity to electromagnetic radiation (only 3-4 % in the visible part though!).

 

Usually, when anything runs on electricity, the energy goes through a cascade of conversions to lower quality forms of energy. Take for example your computer : electricity enters your house and travels through your wires up to your computer. It then enters the power supply, where it is converted from an AC form to a DC form by a rather efficient circuit, and then supplied to many transistors, capacitors, resistors, fan and hard drive motors, and LED's. Transistors, capacitors and resistors emit heat through "Joule heating" or resistive heating (creating heat directly), and they vibrate slightly at some very high frequency (creating sound waves). Motors also create mechanical energy in the form of turbulent flow (CPU fan) or mechanical sound wave (hard disk drive motor). LEDs emit energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation. Here's what happens with all of those forms of energy :

- Joule heating is already heat.

- Sound waves end up propagating through the air, dissipating along the way. Physically, dissipation is caused by frictional forces in the fluid.

- Turbulent air flow happens on many scales depending on the velocity, and those different scales create the big and smaller vortices that you can see in any turbulent flow (wind gusts, flow in a rapid, flow of water down the faucet, etc). Ultimately, whatever the type of fluid or the speed or the size of vortices, viscous dissipation happens and all energy is converted to thermal energy in the fluid.

- Electromagnetic radiation is absorbed by matter, creating internal heat. Yes, the process leading up to the absorption of the LED's energy is the same as the one leading up to your yearly sunburn in spring ;-).

 

In the end, it all ends up as heat anyway. So why not use the electricity wisely before it disappears?

 

This is where the World Community Grid (WCG) comes in. WCG is a nonprofit backed by IBM which creates a distributed supercomputer. Supercomputers are, as you may know, essential to many aspects of research including vaccine and anti-viral medication development, protein folding simulations, drug pre-screening, and many others. WCG allows researchers to use your computer as part of a huge network of other volunteers to run those calculations at a very low cost.

 

Supercomputers require huge cooling power. Unless... unless it's -19 °C outside ;-), in which case, it's essentially free science. The application can be configured to run only when plugged in and when it's not in use, so you basically don't notice it. 

 

You can choose to participate in specific projects, or all of them. I'm currently contributing to finding anti-viral drugs to ZIKA and Ebola and finding potential new drugs for neuroblastoma, Wilms' tumors, hepatoblastoma, germ cell tumors and osteosarcoma. 

 

If this sounds like something you would like to try, simply click here and follow the instructions : The World Community Grid. You can also install it on your Android device and make it work only while it's charging! The app is called HTC Power To Give.

 

Don't hesitate to ask questions!

 

Best Regards

[jul059]

If you're unsure aboud the soundness of this, here's a paper published last summer on a previous project : https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10822-016-9921-4. The reaserchers said that "one of the compounds appears to be able to kill the leishmaniasis parasite without affecting human cells in vitro."