Thanks to the generous contribution of computing power from our members, the Help Conquer Cancer project has concluded.
The Help Conquer Cancer project was launched on November 1, 2007 and was the first World Community Grid project that allowed our volunteers to contribute using their machines' graphics cards. While this project was active, World Community Grid members processed over 500 million results, which required nearly 115,000 CPU-years of computing power. This work would not have been possible without World Community Grid, because it would have taken hundreds of years to run using the computing resources available to the researchers at the Ontario Cancer Institute. Thanks to World Community Grid members, the computations were completed in less than 6 years.
The next step is for the scientists to mine the results data to better understand how to encourage proteins to crystalize, study the crystallized proteins missed by humans inspecting the images, and generally tune the image-analysis algorithms so that real-time evaluation of new data is possible. These are important steps to help scientists better understand protein structure and function, and therefore search for potential drugs to control these cancer-related proteins.
Please read this latest Help Conquer Cancer project update for more information on the recent results.
If you contributed your computer runtime to the Help Conquer Cancer research project, the staff at the Ontario Cancer Institute at the University of Toronto wish to express their sincere gratitude to you.
We still need your help with the other active research projects running on World Community Grid! All of these important projects need your computer time. If you had chosen to contribute only to the Help Conquer Cancer project, please go to your My Projects page to review and update your project selection.