Distributed Computing Helps Energy Project

Distributed computing — where thousands of volunteer PCs help with the number crunching — is aiding the Clean Air Project.

Most of the time we’re only using a fraction of the capacity of our computers. Instead of playing Spider Solitaire, they can perform billions of calculations a second. That’s why the World Community Grid exists, harnessing the power of people volunteering the capacity of their home computers to crunch numbers. Now it’s being used in a joint project between IBM and Harvard University to help discover new solar and energy storage materials, the BBC reports.

The Clean Energy Project is seeking new organic photovoltaics that can make cheap solar cells, then looking for polymers that would be good membranes in the cells. To be commercially viable, solar cells organic molecules need an efficiency of 15%, but are currently around 5%.

The new project will use distributed computing to perform chemical calculations on thousands of organic molecules using the CHARMM molecular mechanics package that was developed by Harvard’s Karplus group.

Professor Aspuru-Guzik, the lead researcher on the project, said:

"It would take us about 100 days of computational time to screen each of the thousands of compounds for electronic properties without the power of World Community Grid."

Instead of the project taking 20 years utilizing a single supercomputer, by employing all the volunteer computing power, it will be completed in about two years.

Distributed computing has become a little more common, with both the Folding at Home project (which unravels molecular protein chains) and the SETI@home project seeking alien life.