As many of you know, TBL Networks began a partnership in 2010 with the World Community Grid, an entity that allows organizations with idle compute capacity to donate it for use in research projects ranging from cancer research to clean energy. When idle, a member computer will request data on a specific project from World Community Grid’s server, and perform computations on this data, sending the results back to the server, and then ask the server for new work. Each computation that a computer performs provides scientists with critical information that accelerates the pace of human discovery. For the last three and a half years, TBL Networks has had a 40 machine Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment using VMware View on our Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) dual B-series blade farm dedicated to finding a cure for cancer. In that time, TBL’s VMware View cluster has computed almost 61 years of runtime towards finding a cure for cancer.
What is exciting now is that the Help Fight Childhood Cancer research team in Japan recently announced it has discovered seven drug candidates that show great promise as new treatments for neuroblastoma, one of the most common and dangerous forms of childhood cancer. In lab tests, these drug candidates were very effective at destroying neuroblastoma tumors without any apparent side effects. This breakthrough marks one of the most significant scientific discoveries to date for World Community Grid and was made possible by the computing power of member computers like the Cisco UCS system at TBL.
Learn more about this groundbreaking discovery in this blog post from Dr. Nakagawara, who leads the Help Fight Childhood Cancer research team, and share the exciting news!