Toronto (ON) – The World Community Grid, one of the major global distributed computing initiatives, said that it will add a Canadian cancer research project to its list of active research projects. Scientists believe that the grid of client computers around the world will complete the image analysis that would otherwise take up to 162 years in roughly two years.     

Distributed computing efforts have become a major component of research analysis in recent years and have become a popular application especially with projects such as Berkeley’s Seti@Home and Stanford’s Folding@Home initiatives. The “Help Conquer Cancer” project is the latest project to take advantage of global grid computing power and becomes the fifth active analysis effort of the World Community Grid at this time.

According to a press release, Canadian researchers expect to accelerate the war on cancer by tapping into the computing horsepower of the World Community Grid , which currently counts about 335,700 members and 795,000 computing devices worldwide. The research team, led by Igor Jurisica at the Ontario Cancer Institute (OCI), and scientists at Princess Margaret Hospital and University Health Network, are the first groups from Canada to use the World Community Grid, a network of client PCs that are estimated to provide the processing capability equivalent to one of the globe’s top five fastest supercomputers.

“We know that most cancers are caused by defective proteins in our bodies, but we need to better understand the specific function of those proteins and how they interact in the body,” said Jurisica in a prepared statement. “We also have to find proteins that will enable us to diagnose cancer earlier, before symptoms appear, to have the best chance of treating the disease - or potentially stopping it completely.”

Jurisica said that the Help Conquer Cancer project will analyze the characteristics of more than 86 million images of about 9400 unique proteins that could be linked to cancer. The images were captured during more than 14.5 million experiments conducted by the Hauptman-Woodward medical research institute.

The World Community Grid went online on November 16, 2005. Since then, approximately 122,500 years of compute time have been donated by users around the globe.

Any user can register to become a member of the World Community Grid. For the Help Conquer Cancer project, the organization said that it will first apply computer resources based on Linux and Windows operating systems, with Mac OS systems expected to follow later on.