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back to article Big Blue donates cloud to unborn solar cells

The World Community Grid, a network of donated processing capacity established by IBM for do-gooder supercomputing projects, said today that it would be donating time to a bunch of Harvard University researchers who are looking for organic materials from which to make flexible and cheaper solar cells. Plastic solar cells, to be …

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  1. Graham Jordan

    Pop it as a ps3 background thingy

    I'll help do some testing.

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  2. Andy
    Joke

    students

    not only do they take my tax money, my beer, my time when explaining the real world to graduates, but they want my CPU cycles as well? naff off!

    go and get nvidia to sponser a CUDA ladboritory or something.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    all i want is a....

    lets be clear about this, we average users dont care about massive fields of solar or wind or water plan/

    all we relly want is something simple small and easy to plug into our 12v kit in house and outside.

    somthing as simple as a kids windmill atached to a tiny 12v dynamo at a £1 a go, linked to many more that you can buy down your local market place, a small self contained £10 water powered catlitic 12v fuelcell that again can take this new universal 12v connector, and finally a few £5 12v PVs to add in this one single garden corner mini pawer plan that connectes universally to the battery outlet in your average underused UK outhouse.

    a total 10 100watt or more that you can run your mini PCs and LCD monitors off in the house is all i need or want right now, but we cant get these mini self contained units or the generic universal conectors that make pluging all this together real easy, and growable week on week as you buy more units to suit your space......

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  4. Bounty

    Why screw up the desert?

    If these things are going to be that easy, why not "wallpaper" your roof instead? Leave the desert to us MX'ers and turtles.

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  5. E

    @AC

    I'll give you two sticks to rub together... might that be simple enough?

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  6. Jacob Lipman

    Interesting math...

    "But using a conventional supercomputer (with a few teraflops of computing power, presumably) would take 100 days to virtually test an organic molecule for its suitableness for the flexible solar cell.

    Harvard wants to look at tens of thousands of molecules and at the scale of supercomputer that the university can bring to bear, this would require 22 years of computation. That is not going to fix our energy problem."

    <pedant>

    Either your math is terrible, or the supercomputer referred to in the first quoted paragraph is vastly inferior to what Harvard can actually bring to bear, as mentioned in the second paragraph.

    For the sake of laziness let's use a nice even 10,000 compounds multiplied by those 100 days of computation each compound requires; this gives us one million days of computation, which when divided by 365.23 leaves us with 2738 years and about 6 hours, 15 minutes.

    </pedant>

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