The United Devices program incorporates a comprehensive system of security and privacy technologies to protect user privacy, the group said. Anthrax was used in tainted letters through the US mail in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the USA, killing five persons and infecting 13 others since early October. The initiative is modeled on the Intel-United Devices Cancer Research Project, which utilized the computing power of 1.3 million personal computers around the world to provide scientists access to a virtual supercomputer more powerful than the world's 10 largest supercomputers combined, the group said. The anthrax project will draw upon the same distributed computing technology to help scientists screen 3.5 billion molecular compounds against the fatal anthrax toxin protein. Results of the project will be made available to the USA, Great Britain and other governments for further development and research. "Without this technology and support of the coalition, there would be no other way to tackle such a tremendous task," Graham Richards, scientific director of the project at Oxford, said in the press release. — Reuters |