Distributed computing for global health

Distributed computing harnesses the power of thousands of computers within organisations or over the Internet. In order to tackle global health problems, several groups of researchers have begun to use this approach to exceed by far the computing power of a single lab. This event illustrates how companies, research institutes and the general public are contributing their computing power to these efforts, and what impact this may have on a range of world health issues. Grids for neglected diseases Vincent Breton, CNRS/EGEE This talk introduces the topic of distributed computing, explaining the similarities and differences between Grid computing, volunteer computing and supercomputing, and outlines the potential of Grid computing for tackling neglected diseases where there is little economic incentive for private R&D efforts. Recent results on malaria drug design using the Grid infrastructure of the EU-funded EGEE project, which is coordinated by CERN and involves 70 partners in Europe, the US and Russia, will be outlined. Tackling Dengue Fever with distributed computing Torsten Schwede, Biozentrum Basel This talk describes recent progress in a collaboration with Novartis to develop drugs for Dengue fever using distributed computing on the Swiss Bio Grid, a partnership which includes Biozentrum Basel, Novartis, The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, the Functional Genomics Centre Zurich, the Friedrich Miescher Institute and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. The World Community Grid Celia Moore, Manager of IBM Corporate Community Relations for Europe, the Middle East and Africa World Community Grid's mission is to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. Our work is built on the belief that technological innovation combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism can change our world for the better. Malaria epidemiology and Africa@home Tom Smith, Swiss Tropical Institute This talk describes a volunteer computing project, currently under development, to drastically increase the computing power available for modeling the epidemiology of malaria. The project is a collaboration between the Swiss Tropical Institute, the University of Geneva, two Geneva-based NGOs and CERN, and involves participation from African Universities in Mali, Cameroun and Senegal. The project has been funded by the Geneva International Academic Network. Getting to grips with global health data Brian Williams, WHO This talk describes how health workers in developing regions such as Africa are faced with huge amounts of data which, given access to adequate computing power, could lead to much better understanding and control of the spread of diseases such as TB and AIDS. The talk outlines future prospects of distributed computing for global health. Q&A session More information: http://www.rezonance.ch