How global computing grid could save the world

A global grid of computers could one day be used to protect the world against disease pandemics and natural disasters.

It's a vision that has been set out by "Big Bang" lab Cern, where a grid of more than 100,000 processors will crunch through the 15 petabytes of data produced by the Large Hadron Collider each year.

David Foster, network and communication systems group leader at Cern, said a similar system could help the world deal with looming crises, from bird flu to earthquakes and financial meltdowns or global warming.

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Foster says countries could follow the joined-up approach of the LHC Grid - which draws on a range of grids including the EC-funded Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (Egee) and the Open Science Grid in the US - to build national grids that could be linked up to form an international super-grid.

Computing grids are already combating diseases: in 2007, the Egee analysed the potential effectiveness of 300,000 possible drug components against the bird flu virus H5N1 and in a project that ran until January last year, the Wisdom grid used 5,000 computers to develop potential treatments for malaria.

The Egee is also offering insights into data in the earth sciences, bioinformatics and astrophysics.

Cern's Foster said: "It would be absolutely ideal to see this idea growing in size and scope and encompassing the whole world, getting the whole world behind the idea of working together for the good of everybody.

"We could say: why not all club together, all provide money, infrastructure and facilities and work out a way we could all share them.

According to Foster, grids excel when users need to bring together a lot of resources to work on a problem in a timely manner.

"You can imagine that you could also take that computing power and use it in the wake of a disaster perhaps to measure the aftermath's effect or for statistical analysis," he said.

"Disasters are unfortunately one of the areas that you have to do a lot of analysis and get a lot of computing power very quickly.

"Statistical analysis can be used to look at many, many things, including the financial markets or avian flu.

"That is the interesting nature of the grid, that any one of us can get back far more than we put in - the whole is more than the sum of its parts."

Ana Lucia Da Costa, Wisdom researcher at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, a research body funded by the French government) laboratories, said that the organisation's computer modelling has developed 30 potential compounds to stop the spread of malaria and could now focus on tackling diabetes and possibly the Aids virus.

"Normal drug development takes 10 to 15 years and millions of dollars but using the computers we can cut that and focus on neglected diseases that drug companies will not invest a lot of money on because they affect people in the third world."

Cern's Foster, however, warned that the common standards that allow the world's computing grids to link up are still being hammered out.

"The problem is the standards - working out the middleware and common approaches - and we are still learning how to do this. It's an ongoing process to get to the level where you really would have a general purpose grid, a sort of turnkey," he added.