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COMPUTER
manufacturer IBM announced Thursday it is taking on the
rice crisis—with the help of Philippines-based
International Rice Research Institute (Irri) and the
University of Washington—using IBM’s World Community
Grid, a supercomputer network that contains one million
registered devices, to form the largest humanitarian
grid in the world.
The Nutritious Rice for the World
program will study rice at the atomic level and combine
it with traditional cross-breeding techniques in a
combination of cutting-edge information technology and
time-tested farming techniques.
IBM information said the project aims to
develop stronger, larger-yield and more nutritious rice
strains by combining the expertise of researchers from
the Irri and the University of Washington with the
computing power of the World Community Grid.
The company estimates that the project
can be completed in less than two years, compared to the
more than 200 years the same research would take using
more conventional computer systems.
“The world is experiencing three
simultaneous revolutions: in molecular biology and
genetics; in computational power and storage capacity;
and in communications. The computational revolution
allows scientists around the world to tackle almost
unimaginably complex problems as a community, and in
real-time,” IRRI director general Robert Zeigler said.
“While there are no silver bullets, rice
production can be revitalized with the help of new
technologies. The world community must invest now and
for a long time to come.”
With the processing power of 167
teraflops, equivalent to the world’s Top 3
supercomputers, the World Community Grid will harness
the unused and donated power from nearly one million
individual PCs for the project
IBM said the supercomputer grid would
run a three-dimensional modeling program created by
computational biologists at the
University of
Washington
to study the structures of the proteins that make up the
building blocks of rice.
IRRI experts said, “Understanding the
structure is necessary to identify the function of those
proteins” so researchers can identify which proteins can
“help produce more rice grains, ward off pests, resist
disease or hold more nutrients.”
This project envisions the creation of
the “largest and most comprehensive map of rice proteins
and their related functions” in an effort to help
agricultural specialists and farmers “pinpoint which
plants should be selected for cross-breeding to
cultivate better crops,” IBM said in a statement.
“The issue is that there are between
30,000 and 60,000 different protein structures to
study,” Dr. Ram Samudrala, principal investigator and
University of Washington microbiology department
associate professor, said in a paper provided by IBM.
“Using traditional experimental
approaches in the laboratory to identify detailed
structure and function of critical proteins would take
decades. Running our software program on World Community
Grid will shorten the time from 200 years to less than
two years.”
The project is funded by a $2-million
grant from the United States’ National Science
Foundation. It has the potential to enable
rice-producing countries to become better adapted to
future climate changes by making it possible for them to
quickly find the right plants for cross-breeding and to
create “super hybrids” that are more resistant to
changing weather patterns. Alma Anonas-Carpio
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