Kirk Pearson's Weblog

grid.org's Smallpox Project Completed

grid.org and the University of Oxford have completed their distributed computing project to find a drug to fight Smallpox, a viral disease which could be used as a bioterror weapon and for which currently there is no cure. The project began on February 5, 2003. Phase 1 of the project was completed on September 30, 2003. That phase used 39,000 years of computing time from volunteers in 190 countries to screen "35 million potential drug molecules against eight models of the smallpox protein" to determine if any of them would prevent the virus from replicating. Potential drug candidates from this project will be studied more closely in another phase of research. No news has been posted about the results of the complete project yet, but the project's news page should be updated soon. The results from this project may also benefit grid.org's project to find cancer-fighting drugs.

So what disease is your computer trying to cure? If it's not, pick a project and get started.

distributed.net completes its OGR-24 project

distributed.net successfully completed its OGR-24 distributed computing project on November 1, 2004. This project, which began over 4 years ago, used a brute force method to find the shortest, or optimal, 24-mark Golomb ruler, a ruler in which no two marks are the same distance apart. The project tested over 555,529,785,505,835,800 rulers (twice, to verify its results), and determined that the previously best-known ruler, 24/9-24-4-1-59-25-7-11-2-10-39-14-3-44-26-8-40-6-21-15-16-19-22, is optimal. Almost 42,000 volunteers participated in the project.

distributed.net is currently running an OGR-25 project, which began over 4 years ago and is over 65% complete, and a RC5-72 project (an attempt to solve the 72-bit RSA Labs secret-key challenge), which began over 2 years ago and is 0.16% complete.