Peter Sinclair: How you can help find a cure for cancer ...

When it comes to supercomputers, there are two ways you can go.

You can do what IBM has always done, and build one of your own.

Late last year, Big Blue announced a $100 million programme to build the world's most powerful supercomputer within five years. Housing a million processors, Blue Gene will be able to perform a thousand trillion calculations each second.

Or you can exploit the power of distributed computing.

This was the route pioneered by the SETI Institute when it made the sci-fi decision to begin a search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

The idea was that the SETI@home project would enlist you, me and millions of other surfers to help them hunt for aliens using our computers' downtime to analyse the 'chirps' from remote stars.

The muscle of distributed computing has been largely unused so far. But here's the latest bid to cash in on that computer power going to waste.

"Don't make a donation - make a difference" was the cry last week when Intel Corporation said that, in association with the dreaming spires of Oxford University, the National Foundation for Cancer Research and United Devices, it would use distributed computing to track down the most unattainable cure of all - yes, the cure for cancer.

The research aims to exploit all this spare capacity - Intel estimates up to 600 million home computers lie idle much of the time - to process information on molecules and send it back to a central server at United Devices' Texas headquarters, which will then pass the data on to Oxford.

They've made the process painless - I downloaded the self-installing executable (over 3.6Mb) and in no time was receiving 1502135Mb of data, my allotted portion of the several trillion the project will check.

Bit by bit, my computer began to perform a few of the millions of calculations required to analyse a molecule, run through an algorithm, measure a tiny temperature change ...

There is, as far as I can tell, no performance hit; and the screensaver you get is cool beyond belief, showing you how far you've got on the molecule (or whatever) you are analysing.

The research will target, specifically, the leukaemias. As one who suffers from one of its many forms, I was about to raise my voice in praise of Intel, to swear I'd have no truck with an Athlon chip ever again, no matter how fast ...

That was till I read the latest Slashdot ( "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters"), which has the biggest debunking department on the net.

Excuse me for thinking for a while that a cure for cancer sounded like a pretty good idea. Slashdot soon put me straight.

As the nerd's bible tells it, United Devices tempts you into downloading their "closed-source, restrictive-licensed client program" (that's geekish for "really, really bad") which, who knows?, could do anything once it's in your computer, including destroying it or committing crimes on it.

United's business model is, according to Slashdot: "Get people to give us computing power and bandwidth for free, and sell it to other people."

Oh, and by the way, when the cure is found it will "belong to Oxford University, [who] will patent it and sell the rights at some extortionate price, and only in 20 years when the patent expires will the world be able to afford cancer cures?"

It's exactly this kind of paranoid ungraciousness that gives geeks a bad name.

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* petersinclair@email.com

Links


Blue Gene

SETI Institute

SETI@home

Intel

Oxford Universtiy

National Foundation for Cancer Research

United Devices

Slashdot

HomeSupplies

LoanSurf