'Grid computing' may help fight cancer

Austin, Texas -- A U.S. biomedical engineering professor is using the concept called "grid computing" to allow people to donate their idle computer time to fight cancer.

University of Texas at Austin Assistant Professor Muhammad Zaman has introduced a grid program called Cellular Environment in Living Systems at home -- or CELS@Home. It allows Internet users worldwide to contribute their idle computer time, creating a "virtual" supercomputer to solve a difficult problem. Zaman's "grid computing" program is helping scientists understand the principles of cell migration and cancer cell metastasis.

He said the program has already yielded enough information in just two months for two scientific journal articles.

He said only a screensaver needs to be downloaded -- at no cost to the user -- to contribute to the CELS@Home effort. A computational program then runs whenever the screensaver is activated, requiring no effort on the part of the user to run the program or report the computations.

People interested in participating in the program can obtain more information at http://cels-at-home-dev.dyndns.org/cels/

Copyright 2008 by United Press International.