Your Computer Downtime Could Help Crack the Alzheimer’s Code | Re/code
Researchers at George Mason University have created a tool that allows anyone to donate their computer downtime to Alzheimer’s research, enlisting the public’s help in studying the sixth leading cause of death in the United States.
A team led by Dmitri Klimov, an associate professor of computational biology in the School of Systems Biology, has constructed complex computer models to study molecules implicated in the disease.
But the computer simulations can take months or even years with limited computing power, so the researchers collaborated with Paragon Computation on the Compute Against Alzheimer’s Disease project. The distributed computing platform allows thousands of computers to work together on the problem all at once. Anyone can install the software, which runs when their computer is idle, chipping into the scientific effort whenever it can. (Download it here.)
“Like a screensaver, it works only when you are not,” said Steven Armentrout, Paragon’s chief executive, in a statement.