This page will keep a record of the progress of IWOC and friends in the LIFE peer to peer cancer research program.

The IWOC against cancer team was created on the 6th April 2001.

As of 23:59 11th April 2004
Number of team members to date - 398
Number of results returned - 319,271
Processing time logged by team - 346 years 105 days 19 hours 14 min 9 secs

Out of over 38,364 teams IWOC is 66th in the number of members,
39th in number of results returned, and
44th in processing time donated.

So what is this all about?

I thought it would be nice for IWOC to actually put something back into the community. We are a virtual Impreza Club, we all have computers, so what to do?

You may have seen on local news reports of a cancer research program which gives computer owners the opportunity to use their personal computing resources to perform scientific research, such as searching for improved treatments and potential cures for cancer and other diseases, by downloading a computer program to their PCs from the Internet. It is being run by United Devices who also run the SETI@home project and is sponsored by Intel. The program has been developed specifically to search for new drugs to treat leukemia. United Devices Inc. developed this program in conjunction with the National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR) and the University of Oxford.

As the program runs, it uses your computer to begin processing a small packet of data. Once processing is complete (about a day later), the program sends the results back to a server and requests a new packet of data. If you aren't online when the processing is done, your computer will wait to send and receive data packets until the next time you're connected to the Internet.

The research program operates in the background, so you shouldn't notice it's running during computer use. It's designed to run only when computing resources are unused. As soon as you run an application that needs computing power, the research program will back down, and your computing performance will not be noticeably impacted. You do not need to leave your PC running either. Just use your PC as normal, turning it on and off as you would. Obviously though, if you do leave your PC on, it will process more data.

Life program in action

It is projected that the resulting "virtual supercomputer" will ultimately be capable of more than 50 teraflops (trillions of operations per second) of computational power and involve millions of participants, and will be ten times more powerful than today's highest performing supercomputers.

As I have been typing this message, my PC has searched through about 4 million permutations and combinations and found 3 possible matches of molecules to one of the proteins thought to be responsible for Leukemia. These "hits" will be sent back to the main server once the data packet has been completed.

So how can you join up?

1. Download theprogram today.
2. Run the program and it will set itself up and you will need to choose a user name and password.
It would be great to see the Impreza team get into the top ten.
3. Join the growing band of Impreza enthusiasts by joining the IWOC team.

A BBC press release can be found here.

Members of Scoobynet, i-Club, and Dutch Subaru Club have also joined the cause under the IWOC banner. Thanks to those involved. To enable us to tell who is who and to generate a bit of competition it has been suggested that we give an indication of where we are from in relation to our various clubs. So preceed you name with one of the following.....
IWOC
i-Club
SNet (for Scoobynet)
DSC (for Dutch Subaru Club)
Check out the team members table to see more detail of how people are using this.

To find out how the Impreza Team is doing against the rest of the world, keep popping by and checking out the top of the page. Alternatively there is an official statistics page which can be found here.

Thank you for taking time to read this, and I hope you will consider joining the fight against cancer. Your interest in the Impreza is all that is required to join up with us, and the fact you are reading this website proves you are interested! It is estimated that 1 in 4 of us will be stricken with the disease at sometime in our lives. Hope to see you signing up. It is for a worthwhile cause.

Regards

Steve

Page created 12th March 2001, last updated...well see the list above dummy!
Copyright © 2001/2/3/4 Steve Breen.