IBM's World Community Grid to develop 'super rice'

International Business Machine (IBM), one of the largest software giant has now decided to ease the burden of global food crisis by participating in the development of ‘superior rice’ using the grand analysis and study programmes of protein structure to enable the farmers to choose the species of the rice for making superior hybrid species that would be more resistant to weather changes and characteristics of higher productivity.

For analysing to develop superior hybrid rice, IBM has made a new programme, ‘Nutritious Rice for the World’ that will run a super processing speed of 167 teraflops, equivalent to that of the world's top 3 supercomputers.

The IBM’s community ‘World Community Grid’ will donate unused power of nearly one million individual computers to this project. The members of the grid will initially study the structure of protein at its atomic level and then apply it on crossbreeding techniques for inventing the super hybrid rice seed that will produce more rice per hectare and more resistant to weather changes.

The ‘World Community Grid’ is the largest public humanitarian grid having more than 3.8 lakh members from over 200 countries, linked with nearly one million computers.

“Anyone with a computer and Internet access can be a part of the solution,” said Stanley Litow, International Foundation President of IBM.

The grid will run a three-dimensional modeling program to study the structure of proteins that constitute the building blocks of rice that would be later passed to the biologist for generating super hybrid species.

This program has been created by computational biologists at the University of Washington. “The issue is that there are between 30,000 and 60,000 different protein structures to study. Using traditional experimental approaches in the laboratory to identify detailed structure and function of critical proteins would take decades. Running our software program on 'World Community Grid' will shorten the time from 200 years to less than 2 years.” said Dr Ram Samudrala, principal investigator and associate professor (Department of Microbiology) at the University of Washington.

According to IBM, National Science Foundation has been allocating the initial fund of USD 2-million that will affect the entire globe as the gained knowledge can also been used in other crops like corn, wheat and barley.