BM has launched a new programme to develop stronger strains of rice that could produce crops with larger and more nutritious yields in its effort to fight global food crisis.
With the processing power of 167 teraflops, equivalent to the world’s Top 3 supercomputer, IBM’s World Community Grid will harness the unused and donated power from nearly one million individual PCs in a new initiative—Nutritious Rice for the World project.
The project will study rice at the atomic level and then combine it with traditional cross breeding techniques used by farmers throughout history, according to IBM officials.
World Community Grid will run a three-dimensional modelling programme created by computational biologists at the University of Washington to study the structures of the proteins that make up the building blocks of rice.
Understanding the structure is necessary to identify the function of those proteins and to enable researchers to identify which ones could help produce more rice grains, ward off pests, resist disease or hold more nutrients, the scientists said.
This project will finally create the largest and most comprehensive map of rice proteins and their related functions, helping agriculturalists and farmers pinpoint which plants should be selected for cross-breeding to cultivate better crops.
University’s Department of Microbiology Associate Professor and Principal Investigator Ram Samudrala said that the major issue here is to study between 30,000 and 60,000 different protein structures.
Ultimately, this project could enable rice-producing countries to become better adapted to future climate changes because they can quickly find the right plants for cross breeding, and create ‘super hybrids’ that are more resistant to changing weather patterns.
This research, jumpstarted by a US $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation, is also important in the US and other countries because the knowledge gained creating the 3D models can be easily transferred to other cereal crops such as corn, wheat and barley, IBM stated.
“This project could ultimately help farmers around the world plant better crops and stave off hunger for some,” IBM International Foundation President Stanley Litow said.
He further said that volunteers can personally effect how quickly this research is completed and can make a significant difference for farmers and people in great need. Anyone with a computer and Internet access can be a part of the solution, he added.
World Community Grid, the largest public humanitarian grid in existence, has 3.8 lakh plus members who represent more than 200 countries and links to nearly one million computers.
