Community computing

The world is in a hurry for cheap, abundant energy. This means newer technologies, newer materials. One area that holds promise is solar. Technologists are looking at every which way to tap this abundant energy. They are succeeding but clearly it all depends on what material you use to trap solar energy.

Material science keeps coming up with exotic stuff that combines the strength of steel and lightness of a feather. But it’s a tough grind as models crunch various combinations of chemicals and elements to arrive at the right one. Again, when tested it may not exactly deliver. Then the search starts all over again.

And so, now we have researchers at IBM and Harvard who want to use the power of community to create cheap, efficient solar cells. The Clean Energy Project will use small amounts of computing power from volunteers to run calculations on compounds so that the wining combination could be found sooner than later. In all, reduce the time by 20 years.

The search is for materials to make cheap, flexible solar cells that could be used on walls and window, clothes or vehicles.

The solar power project will use IBM’s World Community Grid— a large network of volunteer computers that connects computers in homes via the Internet to run calculations that feed back to the data base. The Grid software runs in the background of volunteer computers as a screensaver when the computer is on but not being used.

The program will process over 1 million configurations of atoms in the next two years.

Any work in this area being done in India? Do let us know. Meanwhile it would be interesting to see other ways, than computing, in which communities could be brought together to develop new technologies.