Wednesday, December 3, 2014

New Effort Taps Crowdsourced PCs To Help Find Ebola Cure

A new effort by San Diego-based Scripps Research Institute and IBM is seeking to tap into the collective power of crowdsoruced PCs and Android mobile devices, to help find a cure for Ebola. According to IBM and The Scripps Institute, they have launched a new effort called "Outsmart Ebola Together", which seeks to harness the power of idle computers to create a "virtual supercomputer" for data processing in the Scripps Research Institute research efforts. That "virtual supercomputer"--made up of those crowdsourced PCs and mobile devices--will be used as part of the screening process to screen millions of chemical compounds to identify new drug leads for treating Ebola. The two said the effort is being managed by IBM's World Community Grid>, which has been managing similar crowdsourced computing efforts for other healthcare research efforts.

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