Data+ Awards: Harvard's Clean Energy Project Gets A Massive Speed Boost

Computing grid accelerates data sharing among scientists

Harvard University professor Alan Aspuru-Guzik and his team are supporting the search for organic compounds that could be used in the next generation of solar power cells.

To date, Harvard's Clean Energy Project has studied 2.3 million compounds and accumulated 500 terabytes of molecular data.

A massive undertaking, for sure, but Aspuru-Guzik's team has it covered. They tapped into the IBM World Community Grid -- a distributed platform that uses the spare processing power of about 6,000 computers made available by volunteers around the world -- to perform quantum chemical calculations on millions of organic materials.