Update on Volunteer Your PC programme
Howard Lake | 28 May 2001 | News
The Volunteer Your PC, the Intel – United Devices Cancer Research Project that encourages supporters to donate the spare processing power of their PCs to cancer research, has reported on recent progress. “More than 382,000 members have signed up,” says United Devices.
The Volunteer Your PC, the Intel – United Devices Cancer Research Project that encourages supporters to donate the spare processing power of their PCs to cancer research, has reported on recent progress. “More than 382,000 members have signed up,” says United Devices. They are “contributing more than 562,000 computers to participate in the UD program. Since the project’s launch on April 3rd, we have generated more than 85,000,000 computer processing hours. To accomplish this with a one single PC this would take 9,703 years or 3,541,667 days.”
Unfortunately, there is no figure for the monetary value that this donated distributed processing power has saved the research project.
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The research involves Oxford University’s Chemistry Department. The software is looking for matches between a set of 100 small molecules and and enzyme that is known to be involved in cancer. Any matches are then sent back online to the central research database for further analysis. Professor Graham Richards of the Centre for Computational Drug Discovery said “we are going to get a million people or more which means we’ll be able to screen a billion small compounds.” This could mean identifying at least 100,000 molecules that will be researched further as possible anti-cancer agents.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.