As concerns of a global hunger crises mount, IBM and researchers at the University of Washington today launched a new program to develop stronger strains of rice that could produce crops with larger and more nutritious yields. 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 -- that will study rice at the atomic level and then combine it with traditional cross breeding techniques used by farmers throughout history. The project can be completed in less than two years as compared to over 200 years using more conventional computer systems.

World Community Grid will run a three-dimensional modeling program 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. In the end, this project will 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.

[World Community Grid]