IBM has introduced a crowdsourced supercomputing system in an effort to help scientists develop new medicinal compounds based on genomic data analysis.
The World Community Grid supercomputer works to access the computer power of thousands of volunteers worldwide in order to compare 200 million proteins registered from the genes of various life forms, IBM said Wednesday.
IBM intends for the project to identify new gene functions and determine the interaction between organisms and their environment.
UNSW Australia and Brazil’s Oswaldo Cruz Institute will administer the processing of protein sequences, with a special focus on microorganisms for genetic analysis.
Researchers will be able to reference the database of protein sequence comparisons generated by World Community Grid.
World Community Grid is developed based on software from Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing at the University of California, Berkeley.