IBM's (NYSE: IBM) World Community Grid, a worldwide network of PC owners helping scientists solve humanitarian challenges, today announced several computing projects aimed at developing techniques to produce cleaner and safer water, an increasingly scarce commodity eluding at least 1.2 billion people worldwide.
One initiative will simulate how human behaviors and ecosystem processes relate to one another in watersheds such as the Chesapeake Bay. Other projects will explore advanced water filtering techniques and seek cures for a water-borne disease.
To accelerate the pace, lower the expense, and increase the precision of these projects, scientists will harness the IBM-supported World Community Grid to perform online simulations, crunch numbers, and pose hypothetical scenarios. The processing power is provided by a grid of 1.5 million PCs from 600,000 volunteers around the world. These PCs perform computations for scientists when the machines would otherwise be underutilized. Scientists also use World Community Grid -- equivalent to one of the world's fastest supercomputers -- to engineer cleaner energy, cure disease and produce healthier food staples.
The University of Virginia Watershed Sustainability Project will use World Community Grid to power its "UVa Bay Game/Analytics" project, which models the effects of agricultural, commercial and industrial decisions on the Chesapeake Bay. This waterway is a vital estuary on the East Coast of the United States stretching 64,000 square miles with 11,600 miles of tidal shoreline, and home to nearly 17 million people. It will simulate and analyze the results of choices made by the sometimes-competing interests of fishermen, farmers, real estate developers, power plant designers, conservationists, forestry experts and urban planners. Better understanding the potential outcomes of complex, intersecting decisions can help society manage the watershed more effectively.
"Through this collaboration, the University of Virginia and World Community Grid are bringing new resources to bear to improve the future of the Chesapeake Bay," said Philippe Cousteau, co-founder of Azure Worldwide, which helped develop the UVa Bay Game. "Responsible and effective stewardship of complex watersheds is a huge undertaking that must balance the needs of each unique environment with the needs of the communities that depend on them for survival. I'm confident that this partnership will help provide the tools we need to meet this challenge head- on."
Another new water-related project, called "Computing For Clean Water," is looking to produce more efficient and effective water filtering, and is now getting underway at Tsinghua University's newly launched Centre for Novel Multidisciplinary Mechanics in China. The idea is to develop ways to filter and scrub polluted water, as well as convert saltwater into drinkable freshwater, with less expense, complexity, and energy than current techniques.
The effort will seek to reduce the pressure and energy required to force water through microscopic, nanometer-sized pores in tubes made of carbon, whose tiny holes prevent harmful organic material from being transmitted. Scientists need to produce millions of computer simulations to model how water molecules interact with one another and against the walls of these carbon nanotubes.
Although led by China's Tsinghua University, researchers are participating from all over the world, including Australia's University of Sydney and Monash University; as well as the Citizen Cyberscience Centre, based in Geneva, Switzerland. The project is the result of an initiative launched by the Chinese Academy of Sciences to promote volunteer participation in science. It is called CAS@home, and is hosted by the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing.