Robin Wilner is Vice President of Global Community Initiatives at IBM.

GCJ: Can you give our readers a brief history of the grid since its inception, and maybe what it's doing now?

Wilner: Sure. World Community Grid was launched in November 2004. IBM has a long history of investing in the communities where IBMers and our customers live and work. And one thing that we are always eager to bring to those communities is the special application of technology that really can make a difference to improve their lives. So while we do a lot to make businesses more productive and more efficient, we also want to make sure that people have an opportunity to see how our technology can improve our global communities.

World Community Grid is a wonderful opportunity to address a lot of the issues that concern people in terms of biomedical advances, environmental issues, basic bench research, and particularly the fields that, for whatever reason, are not attracting dollars in the market environment. For example, is there research that's not being funded by big pharmaceutical companies, that's not getting dollars from the standard sources? Or are there basic research issues that could potentially have a huge impact on humanity, but are too fundamental, too far away from immediate application to win funding from the marketplace? Are there environmental issues that just are not getting the attention they need?

We think so, and we want to make sure that World Community Grid is positioned to attract those kinds of research that will really improve our world, and put those findings into the public domain. But we also want to push grid technology to do certain kinds of research that hasn't been feasible in the recent past.

As for our size, I just took a look at our World Community Grid statistics. We now have over 200,000 members, and about 360,000 devices. So when you add up the raw processing power of that, it's probably equivalent to the biggest supercomputer in the world. It's an amazing thing how this has just taken off throughout the world.

GCJ: Agreed. You mentioned some of your areas of interest. Could you describe to me some of the World Community Grid's recent projects, as well as some of its longer-term interests?

Wilner: Absolutely. We have two projects running right now, and a third one that we're launching. We are running one basic research project, the Human Proteome Folding Project. This is a very important investigatory initiative to understand the formation of proteins, the basic biological building blocks of human beings and other organisms. The more we understand how proteins work, what they look like, how they function when they're healthy, what they look like and how they function when they're not healthy, the more effective our treatments to human disease can become.

One of our newest undertakings through a second phase of the project is some research concerned specifically with those proteins that are connected to malaria. Malaria is the leading killer in the world today, but people don't know that, because it's not a disease we worry about in the United States. Learning more about how the human genomic structure helps to fend off malaria could make a huge difference down the road. So this is a very basic kind of inquiry, but one that didn't interest business people because they couldn't see what the direct implications were going to be.

Our partner on this project is the Institute for Systems Biology, and I'm pleased to say that in six months of work, we finished what they said could have easily taken 100 years, given what equipment they had sitting around. This was an example of research that had been abandoned for want of a supercomputer. And then we got involved, rallied all of these people to contribute, mustered the computing power of a supercomputer through World Community Grid, and got it done in six months. And now we're moving on to the second phase.

GCJ: What else do you have ongoing?

Wilner: Another piece of research that we're running is FightAIDS@Home. And this is a little bit more immediate in terms of the implications. If you know anything about the AIDS virus, you know that one of the things that makes it so deadly and so difficult to address is that it's a virus that mutates really quickly. There's been wonderful progress made in coming up with medicines that can interrupt the cycle of the AIDS virus, but the current AIDS drugs are not going to be effective in short order because of the way that the virus mutates.

With FightAIDS@Home, we're actually doing the research to identify those chemicals that are most likely to be effective inhibitors for the maturation of the AIDS virus, and speed those compounds to the clinical trials so that if and when the current crop of compounds fail, we'll be ready with the next generation of drugs. And again, I'm proud to say that the work that we did on phase one was completed in six months. That would have taken five years if they hadn't had access to World Community Grid, which may well have disqualified them for federal funding because the government only gives grants for projects that take up to five years. But because we can make this computational power available, scientists were actually able to start this research and prepare for the next generation of AIDS drugs.

GCJ: Right, so that leads to the question around funding. Is this all government-funded or...

Wilner: No, it's funded by IBM.

GCJ: Completely?

Wilner: Absolutely. And the computational power is totally free. Now, our partners may have other sources of funding. For example, we're doing the work on FightAIDS@Home with the Scripps Research Institute, and they do have government grants that fund what they do next with the results.

GCJ: You seem to be saying that the projects you've done were not only economically, but statistically and practically impossible to do this work without the Grid. Is that true?

Wilner: Yes, Dr. Arthur Olson at Scripps has told us his lab would not have engaged in this research without the power of World Community Grid. And what's also very important about this is that all of the results go into the public domain. So it's not only that it's free to the researchers whose projects run on the grid, but we want as many - we want anybody and everybody to get their hands on the results, because they can help further their own research. It's all about discovery.

GCJ: And from a setup and a joining perspective, how does that happen, and who are the folks that are joining and helping out here?

Wilner: Well, as I said, we now have more than 200,000 individual members. And because many of them have multiple computers, we actually have more than 360,000 devices on World Community Grid. You just go to worldcommunitygrid.org. It takes less than five minutes to join. It's very simple, it's safe, and it's completely secure. In less than five minutes you can start putting your idle computer time to good use.

GCJ: You said earlier that World Community Grid's computational power rivals some of the world's largest supercomputers. Has there ever been a degradation in service resulting from the sheer numbers of members involved in providing that service?

Wilner: We built this system to accommodate up to 10 million devices, so we're still welcoming members. So there's still plenty of room to grow. And the more devices we get, the more research we can run simultaneously.

GCJ: And which platforms do you support? This isn't only for PC users, is it?

Wilner: No; you can join if you use Windows, you can join if you're a Mac user, you can join if you're a Linux user.

GCJ: Great. So really anybody from a researcher to a high school student using a home computer can come on board?

Wilner: That's right. I'm running this on my home computer. You don't have to have a detailed understanding of the science behind human proteome folding to help advance the field of knowledge. And you don't have to be a computer geek. If you're comfortable shopping on Amazon.com, you can join World Community Grid. It is a really open, user-friendly, civic-minded initiative, designed to improve the well-being of humanity.

GCJ: I do appreciate the spirit of it. Now, from a perspective of software development, you mentioned that IBM's built this to handle 10 million devices. Has administering such a large grid driven much innovation at IBM?

Wilner: Well, the great thing about the grids is that they make efficient use of technology we already have. World Community Grid runs on Linux servers, using existing software. But there certainly are lots of innovations that we've made around distributed computing, regarding security, and usability. Now users can, for example, change waiting periods, control when they contribute to the grid, and designate when they want to reclaim their computing power.

All of that intellectual property is obviously something that we hope to bring to other grid customers. At the same time, we are working with BOINC, and so some of the things that we've learned about this in particular could potentially help other community projects using that particular open source code.

GCJ: Great. I've heard you have a brand new project to announce. What can you tell us?

Wilner: Yes. I'm very excited to give your readers the scoop. The new project is called Help Defeat Cancer, and it's a project that we are doing in partnership with The Cancer Institute of New Jersey, UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Rutgers University and the University of Pennsylvania.

The goal here is to develop more accurate methods of diagnosing cancer and to do those diagnoses earlier in the progression of the disease. And in particular, we're using something called tissue microarrays, which is a pretty cutting-edge technology that lets you compare specimens from literally thousands of different biopsies and thousands of different individuals. Using World Community Grid, we have the computational power to actually turn those tissue microarrays, turn those stains, into algorithms. And then rather than perform comparative analysis by hand, we will be able to do an objective computation and get a very, very accurate diagnosis. We're also hopeful that this type of analysis might help us to recognize some very, very early signs of various kinds of cancer for the first time.

GCJ: That's a bold mission, and I would imagine it will gain a lot of press and popularity just based on the kind of mission statement you just described. From a member and device perspective, do you have any projections on where you think you'll be in a year or so?

Wilner: I don't want to project. At the moment we are still in the process of launching Help Defeat Cancer, but there'll be lots of information forthcoming on worldcommunitygrid.org.

GCJ: Your current suite of projects seems pretty diverse. Can you say anything about what criteria guides your decision to fund research? Or where you have your sights set on next?

Wilner: At IBM, we are committed to innovation that matters for our customers and for the world - and that's what World Community Grid is all about. The three research projects we have now are very much in this spirit-like I said, taking technology and really using it to improve people's lives.

But since you have a creative, technical audience, I just want to say that we are always ready for more research projects. We have some things coming down the pike that are going to be very exciting; there is one on climate modeling and predictions in Africa, and some work on avian flu. But we would love more research projects. We are anticipating a big increase in devices with the launch of Help Defeat Cancer, which of course will help us get that work done more quickly-but it may also enable us to take on more projects.

GCJ: And so what is the procedure for our readers, if they had something, to approach and put a proposal together or something along those lines?

Wilner: It's easy. You go to worldcommunitygrid.org, and on the home page you'll see link to submit research. There's a Request for Proposals, fill it out, and we'll follow up with folks. I look forward to reading them!

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