Help Conquer Cancer



What are the potential benefits of the "Help Conquer Cancer" project?

There are several direct and indirect benefits of the project. For the first time, scientists will execute a comprehensive image analysis and classification of crystallography images. This will lead to better understanding of the crystallization process, and will enable scientists to improve the accuracy and speed of CrystalVision. Improved understanding of the crystallization process and improved CrystalVision also will enable more disease proteins to be crystallized faster. Finally, more 3D structures will improve our understanding of disease and potentially its treatment, and will lead to improved in silico (performed on a computer or via computer simulation) structure prediction.



What will World Community Grid's calculations produce?

On the lowest level, CrystalVision will compute thousands of image features for each crystallography image. This data objectively measures characteristics of the image, which will enable scientists to use a system to discern image classification. In turn, this will allow them to automatically and objectively characterize results from the high-throughput crystallization screens, and then apply data mining techniques to optimize future crystallization experiments.



What will happen with the data generated by all these calculations?

After careful analysis, evaluation and interpretation, all results will be published in the public domain. The scientists' first goal is to improve the CrystalVision system to enable automated, accurate and fast crystallography image classification. This algorithm will then be deployed at Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute to ensure that this public high-throughput crystallography screening facility will speed up crystallization of many disease-related proteins.



Why are my work units failing with exit code 233 “ERROR: Kernel execution time estimate too high, exiting”?

At the beginning of each work unit run on your graphics card, a small portion of the workload is run to estimate the execution time of a single kernel execution on the graphics card. If this estimate is too high, the application will exit to reduce the risk of Windows restarting the display driver due to the Timeout Detection and Recovery feature of Windows. If this occurs, the above error message will be written to the stderr log. If this occurs multiple times, it is likely the graphics card is not capable of running the project. Please refer to the "What graphics cards are not able to participate in the Help Conquer Cancer research project?"FAQ for a list of graphics cards which are not supported.

If it occurs occasionally but not on every execution, it could be that other graphics intensive work is interfering. We recommend that you set your preferences to not allow World Community Grid to run while you are actively utilizing your computer. This option is available on the Device Profile page under the custom options section. This option is labeled "Do work on my graphics card while computer is in use?". Select "no" and save.



Why are my work units failing with exit code 234 “Error: cl_khr_local_int32_base_atomics extension required by this program is not supported”?

The Help Conquer Cancer graphics card application requires the OpenCL extension cl_khr_local_int32_base_atomics and will not run on cards that do not support this extension. If you see the error above it is because your graphics card does not support the extension.