An update to yesterday’s posting, in which I complained that I couldn’t find any interesting use for all of my idle CPU cycles. I’m still not excited about searching for extra-terrestial life in the universe, and I’m not as excited as I should be about long-term medical research. But it turns out that there’s a short-term research program that perhaps all of us can focus on: investigating potential drug treatments for the avian flu.

As reported in a recent Infoworld article, and a recent GRIDtoday article, the Rothberg Institute for Childhood Diseases has developed a small downloadable program that uses your CPU’s idle cycles to run a screen-saver program that simulates the binding of drug molecules with proteins — referred to as “targets” — in avian flu. As a humbling reminder that all kinds of things are happening out there in cyberspace that even reasonably well-informed people (like your humble blogger) haven’t heard about, the Rothberg Institute reports that they’ve already tapped into the idle-CPU resources of some 80,000 volunteers in 93 countries.

The program is called Drug Design and Optimization Lab (D2OL), and you can read about it and download the screen-saver program from this site. I was pleased to see that they’ve got versions for Windows, Macintosh, Solaris, and Linux; that may not cover the entire universe of computing platforms, but it’s certainly approaching the 99% level.