There is currently no treatment for smallpox and the DoD wants to bring to bear a large amount of computing power to try to change that. Vaccination prior to catching the disease is the only real treatment, and the amount of smallpox vaccine in the world is very small. With bioterrorism worries on the rise, a variant of smallpox is an obvious candidate for a weapon of mass destruction.

The Smallpox Research Grid will be based on a grid of PCs that could approach two million, with an aggregate of 1,100 teraflops of aggregate computing power. United Devices, IBM, and Accelrys will run off-the-shelf drug discovery applications that have been grid enabled on slices of these PCs and on a set of Unix servers supplied by IBM as a back-end system. Specifically, IBM is bringing in its high-end pSeries 690 Regatta-H servers, which will house the DB2 databases behind the applications.

The machines will also run United Devices’ Global Metaprocessor, a grid controlling program that will parcel out the capacity on the servers, workstations, and PCs attached to the Smallpox Research Grid. (United Devices, based in Austin, is a spinoff of the SETI@home grid project that is sifting through radio signals from space for signs of life out there.) The grid will run Accelrys’ LigandFit, a molecular modeling application that creates virtual molecules and sees what effect they have on virtual smallpox viruses. Once virtual drugs are screened for their effectiveness against smallpox, researchers will be able to proceed with developing the real drugs based on this information.

The University at Oxford, Essex University, and the Robarts Research Institute at the University of Western Ontario are involved in the project, and they have contributed their expertise and molecular libraries for the grid to play with as a starting point. Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center are also involved, and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases will manage the project for the DoD. All of the organizations and people involved in the project are donating their time and products to the cause. All United Devices needs is for the two million contributors it has lined up with slices of their machines to let them run the smallpox project code on their machines.

Source: Computerwire