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Amidst rising concerns about a global hunger crisis, IBM and researchers at the University of Washington have launched a new program named “Nutritious Rice for the World” to develop stronger strains of rice that could produce crops with better and more nutritious yields.With a dispensation power of 167 teraflops, equivalent to that of the world’s top 3 supercomputers, IBM’s ‘World Community Grid’ will harness unused and donated power from nearly one million individual computers in this project. The grid will study rice at the atomic level, then combining it with traditional cross-breeding techniques used by farmers throughout history.’World group of people Grid’ will run a three-dimensional modeling program created by computational biologists at the institution of higher education of Washington to study the structure of proteins that comprise the building blocks of rice. This is meant at creating the largest and most comprehensive map of rice proteins and their related function, helping agriculturalists and farmers pinpoint which plants could be chosen for cross-breeding to farm improved crops.

According to Dr Ram Samudrala, principal researcher and associate professor (Department of Microbiology) at the University of Washington, “The issue is that there are flanked by 30,000 and 60,000 different protein structures to study. Using traditional experimental approaches in the laboratory to identify thorough structure and function of critical proteins would take decades. Running our software program on ‘World group of people Grid’ will shorten the occasion from 200 years to less than 2 years.”The project, with an initial funding of $2 million from the National Science Foundation, could enable rice-producing countries to better adapt themselves to future climatic change as they could quickly find the right plants for cross breeding and create super hybrids that are more resistant to weather changes.Consumers can contribute in this project by donating their unused processor time. Anyone with a processor and Internet access can be part of this noble solution. Those interested in participating can register here, and install a free, small, safe software agenda onto their PCs.