Thousands of volunteers are lending their PC power to help fight the scourge of malaria.
Researchers behind a new project called MalariaControl.net are harnessing the number-crunching power of idle computers to model the effects of the disease and possible treatments.
Malaria kills more than a million people every year, mostly young children in Africa.
To help combat the disease, many researchers build simulations of how malaria spreads. But such modeling is extremely computer intensive.
So MalariaControl.net asks volunteers to download software onto their computers that runs while the machines aren't being used. The software models malaria transmission in Africa and the potential impact of new antimalarial drugs.
The software works similarly to Seti@home and Climateprediction.net, two popular "distributed computing" programs. They help search for extraterrestrial life and predict climate change, respectively.
"MalariaControl.net will complete in a few months—using thousands of volunteer PCs—a volume of computing that would normally take up to 40 years to complete [on our own]," said François Grey of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva, Switzerland.
MalariaControl.net is the first to use distributed computing to model disease.
The program was developed by researchers at the Swiss Tropical Institute (STI) in Basel and launched publicly three weeks ago. It is the first computer model created for a new project called Africa@home.
Conceived and coordinated by CERN, Africa@home is a Web site for volunteer computing projects that allow people's computers to contribute to African humanitarian causes.
Deadly Disease
There are now as many as 500 million malaria cases each year, the vast majority of them in Africa (Africa map). About 90 percent of all malaria deaths occur on the continent, and malaria is the single largest killer of young African children.
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