What test will IMB researchers put into place this year?
IBM and the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) launched an effort using IBM’s World Community Grid “virtual supercomputer” to allow laboratory tests on drug candidates for drug-resistant influenza strains and new strains, such as H1N1, in less than a month. Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch will use World Community Grid to identify the chemical compounds most likely to stop the spread of the influenza viruses and begin testing these under laboratory conditions. The computational work adds up to thousands of years of computer time which will be compressed into just months using World Community Grid. As many as 10% of the drug candidates identified by calculations on World Community Grid are likely to show antiviral activity in the laboratory and move to further testing. According to the researchers, without access to World Community Grid’s virtual super computing power, the search for drug candidates would take a prohibitive amount of time and laboratory testi
Apple’s 10 million iPhone users are now meaningful research subjects for IBM’s Almaden Research Center. Scientists studying the mobile web are seeding Apple’s iPhone Applications Store with research projects in a bid to see how users in the real world take to them. The projects include an experimental text-input system and an application to sync multiple devices. Almaden is so interested in the iPhone, it is making them available for free to all 100 of its computer scientists to help them understand how consumers use the device. “The iPhone App Store gave us a chance to experiment in the wild,” says researcher Shumin Zhai, who has added the experimental text-input system WritingPad to the App Store as a free download. “Putting it on the iPhone App Store gave us a sense of the value of the technology.” Computer scientists’ interest in the iPhone is not surprising. The device is quickly becoming the first mainstream mobile computing platform. The iPhone has already captured about 17 perc
