Top distributed computing projects still hard at work fighting the world’s worst health issues
This past fall saw the worst Ebola outbreak ever ravage western Africa, and while medical researchers are trying to find a drug to treat or prevent the disease, the process is long and complicated. That's because you don't just snap your fingers and produce a drug with a virus like Ebola. What's needed is a massive amount of trial and error to find chemical compounds that can bind with the proteins in the virus and inhibit replication. In labs, it can take years or decades.Thanks to thousands of strangers, Ebola researchers are getting the help and computing power they need to shave off the time needed to find new drugs by a few years.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 26 crazy and scary things the TSA has found on travelers Distributed computing is not a new concept, but as it is constituted today, it's an idea born of the Internet. Contributors download a small app that runs in the background and uses spare PC compute cycles to perform a certain process.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here