The science service
The grid technology, which enables the unification of different computing resources, unites surfers from all over the world, helping to save millions of children in Africa. Malaria is the most common infectious disease in the world, responsible for the death of a million people a year. Every 30 seconds a child dies in Africa as a result of malaria.
The project, which aims to reduce the impact of the disease in Africa, was launched by CERN - one of the leading research institutions in the world. Another project that was carried out at CERN about 18 years ago, gave birth to the Internet network (World Wide Web) that we know today. The new project unites surfers who donate their computer, through the Internet, while they are not using it. The sharing of computers for the benefit of medical research is made possible through the use of grid technology.
The purpose of the current study is to use the combined computing power of all computers, in order to simulate the spread of malaria in the African continent. Running the simulation using thousands of volunteer computers, using grid technology, will allow researchers to better understand the effect of new malaria treatments, with the aim of reducing its spread as much as possible.
The name of the project is Africa@home and it is similar in its operation to other projects that preceded it, such as Seti@home. The project started experimentally about four months ago and is now officially launched. So far, about 2000 surfers have joined the project. Those interested in joining the project can get more details on the official website at: malariacontrol.net. For information and joining other voluntary projects using grid technology, you can browse the website of the Israeli Association for Grid Technologies: grid.org.il under Join Grid for Research
Avner Algum, CEO of the Israeli Association for Grid Technologies (Grid.org.il), explains the principle of operation of the grid technology: just as surfers see the content on the Internet (WEB) as one logical resource, so grid users see the network as one virtual computer. For example, computing tasks that require a lot of computing power are "broken down" into small chunks, each of which is processed by a different computer. In this way, an aggregate computing power is obtained, which makes it possible to deal with complex computing tasks.
