Amidst mounting concerns about a global hunger crisis, IBM and researchers at the University of Washington have launched a new program named "Nutritious Rice for the World" to develop stronger strains of rice that could produce crops with larger and more nutritious yields.
With a processing power of 167 teraflops, equivalent to that of the world's top 3 supercomputers, IBM's 'World Community Grid' will harness unused and donated power from nearly one million individual computers in this project. The grid will study rice at the atomic level, then combining it with traditional cross-breeding techniques used by farmers throughout history.
'World Community Grid' will run a three-dimensional modeling program created by computational biologists at the University of Washington to study the structure of proteins that constitute the building blocks of rice. This is aimed at creating the largest and most comprehensive map of rice proteins and their related functions, helping agriculturalists and farmers pinpoint which plants could be selected for cross-breeding to cultivate better crops.
According to Dr Ram Samudrala, principal investigator and associate professor (Department of Microbiology) at the University of Washington, "The issue is that there are between 30,000 and 60,000 different protein structures to study. Using traditional experimental approaches in the laboratory to identify detailed structure and function of critical proteins would take decades. Running our software program on 'World Community Grid' will shorten the time from 200 years to less than 2 years."
The project, with an initial funding of $2 million from the National Science Foundation, could enable rice-producing countries to better adapt themselves to future climatic changes as they could quickly find the right plants for cross breeding and create super hybrids that are more resistant to weather changes.
Consumers can participate in this project by donating their unused computer time. Anyone with a computer and Internet access can be part of this noble solution. Those interested in participating can register here, and install a free, small, secure software program onto their PCs.
if you use the world community grid to make the rice, you need to sell the technology for free and free of your patents, gentlemen. Have you given that a thought as well? For the record, companies like Monsanto and Novartis take our crops and know how and make partial modifications and "patent" their "innovations" and extort money from us. How do you guarantee this will not happen here? Govts change, CEOs change. The new people could do anything differently.
by Kedar Mokashi
from Mumbai
on 20/05/08 08:43 AM
But this is a university program, sponsored by IBM. and IBM doesnt seem to b the company who'd like squeezin out money from u like MS
so i'd say that this is a seemingly a goodinitiative
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