By running the problem across 5,000 computer for a total of four months, the WISDOM project analyzed some 80,000 drug compounds every hour. The search for new drug compounds is normally a time-intensive process, but the grid approach did the work of 420 years of computation in just 16 weeks. Individuals in over 25 countries participated.
Up to 5,000 computers were used at any one time, generating a total of 2,000GB of useful data. More than 140 million compounds were processed by the end of the four months, and results are expected to speed up and reduce the costs involved in searching for an anti-malaria drug.
"Drug development is a very long process, typically [lasting] 12 years and [costing] US$800 million," said Vincent Breton, a research associate at the French National Centre for Scientific Research who worked on the project. "What WISDOM shows is that the first step of this process which is drug discovery can be significantly accelerated and made cheaper using grids. This is particularly relevant to neglected diseases which suffer a lack of R&D [Research and Development]."
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