John Cottingham posted the article  " Intel Philanthropic Peer-to-Peer
Computing Program to Help Accelerate Alzheimer's Research" a few days
ago.
If you haven't done so already - take a look aat the suggested website
http://www.intel.com/cure
This is really fascinating stuff! It seems to provide an easy and
important way we can help further the research process.
John, are you or is anyone else participating in this project?

Does anyone know if there are Parkinson's researchers involved in such
peer-to-peer computer programs? If not, the existing programs for
Alzheimer's leukemia and AIDS research are looking for volunteers and
certainly seem worthwhile .

Below are two additional articles about peer-to-peer computing and
medical research. This quote from the first article particularly caught
my eye:

"Organizers believe that eventually their project could cut by more than
half the time
it takes to develop a drug."

Could anyone give us more information about peer-to-peer computing. One
question is if this could increase chances of picking up computer
viruses?
Linda

ARTICLE 1:
Peer-to-peer to serve as basis for research
American Medical News
May 28, 2001
Authors:  Tyler Chin

"INTEL CORP. AND PROMINENT CANcer researchers are launching an effort to
create a "virtual supercomputer" by linking millions of computers over
the Internet to find cures and improved treatments for cancer and other
life-threatening conditions.

Under the initiative, called the Intel Philanthropic Peer-to-Peer
Program,
those who own PCs would allow participating researchers to tap unused
disk
space and processing power in their computers to solve problems that
require
massive computing power. The American Cancer Society, National Foundation
for Cancer Research, University of Oxford and United Devices Inc., a
technology
company in Austin, Texas, are sponsoring the project along with Intel.

Intel, the leading seller of microprocessors that are the brains of a
computer,
plans to approach the AMA to get physicians to donate unused processing
power to the cancer research program, a spokesman said.

The AMA had no comment because it hasn't been approached yet, a
spokeswoman
said.

The research project will use a technology known as peer-to-peer, which
allows users to share computer resources and services by direct exchange
between systems.

It will attempt to link the hundreds of millions of computers connected
to the Internet, thus creating a virtual supercomputer that researchers
can use to research the cancer-fighting properties of molecules.
Organizers
believe that eventually their project could cut by more than half the
time
it takes to develop a drug.

While the Intel-sponsored project initially will focus on leukemia,
organizers
plan to expand research to other types of cancer and serious conditions
such as Parkinson's disease and diabetes.

To participate in the project, PC owners must download a software program
from Intel's Web site (http:ll www.intel.com/curel). The program,
developed
by United Devices, will run in the background when users use applications
such as word processing or spreadsheets, or as a screen saver when PCs
are idle. It will run only when unused processing power is available on
your PC, and you should not see any performance problems when you use
your
computer, organizers said."

ARTICLE 2
Philanthropic p-to-p
InfoWorld
Jun 18, 2001
Authors: Cathleen Moore

"FightAIDSatHome uses volunteers' idle computing power to do drug
research
calculations

TEN YEARS AGO, when Art Olson and a team of researchers at The Scripps
Research Institute developed an algorithm that could be used to improve
the design of drugs that fight AIDS, Olson felt like he was standing at
the bottom of a towering mountain.

Olson's work as director of the molecular graphics laboratory at the La
Jolla, Calif-based institute uses a process of mathematical computations
called "molecular docking" to test how AIDS drugs interact with virus
proteins.
Olson's ongoing project, sponsored by the National Institute of Health,
holds significant promise for combatting the daunting problem of drug
resistance
in the treatment of AIDS and HIV, according to Olson.

"Our interest has been in developing computational methods to help
predict
how the evolution of drug resistance occurs in the virus and how we can
design better drugs against resistance. It is a real clinical problem,"
Olson says. "The AIDS virus generates about a billion different mutations
each day, and some of those mutations work better with drugs than
others."

The research project was slowly chipping away at the problem of drug
resistance,
but the project's scope was limited by lack of computing resources.

"When we started this project, we didn't have the computing capacity to
do detailed calculations. So we started with simple calculations to give
us some principals and info to begin working with," Olson explains.

Olson and his colleagues had dealt with only a small part of the
calculation;
the research requirements were potentially much larger.

"It is a very large computational problem. You are talking about millions
upon millions of different docking calculations," Olson adds.

During the research, Olson's laboratory was contacted by Entropia, an
emerging
peer-to-peer distributed computing service based in San Diego. Entropia
offered to lend Olson's AIDS research the power of an expansive p-to-p
computing environment. P-to-p leverages the power of a variety of
distributed,
Internet-connected devices, pooling the collective power of otherwise
unused
resources.

"Today, people have processors on their desks that are pretty much
equivalent
to the individual processor in a supercomputer, but they don't have the
very fast interconnect between those processors," Olson says.

Not all scientific calculations can take advantage of p-to-p computing,
but Olson says he knew that his molecular docking project was structured
in a way that distributed problem solving could support.

In partnership with Olson and The Scripps Research Institute, Entropia
launched its FightAIDSatHome project last September, providing the
infrastructure
and software needed to sustain a large distributed network of peers.
Olson
and his team set up programming scripts that contain all the information
needed to run a piece of the larger calculation.

The FightAIDSatHome service works by breaking the laboratory's large
computational
problems into small assignments, which are then distributed via the
Internet
to individual computers that have downloaded Entropia's free software.
As of last month, 25,810 machines have volunteered CPU space to the
project.
These contributions have resulted in 767,532 tasks completed for the
docking
calculation, according to Entropia.

When a participating computer is on and connected to the Internet, it
connects
to the Entropia server and downloads a docking calculation. When the
volunteer
computer's CPU is idle, it gives time toward the research calculation.
The calculation grinds away continuously as a background process on
volunteer
machines, running from minutes to hours to complete the job. When it is
done, it sends results back and asks for a new problem to work on.

Aside from the contribution of much needed computing resources, one of
the biggest rewards of the FightAIDSatHome project has been the growth
of a network of budding research enthusiasts, according to Olson. The
project's
Web site, at www .fightaidsathome.org, provides information on how
volunteers
can get involved further and allows volunteers to set up teams of users
and then track how well their teams do.

"Not only can we take advantage of distributed computing for my
calculations,
but we also get people interested and involved in the scientific
research,
which is important," Olson says.

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