# Update on Volunteer Your PC programme

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2001/05/28/update-volunteer-your-pc-programme/
- Published: 2001-05-28T23:00:00+01:00
- Author: Howard Lake

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.

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.

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