British physicists have shared computer time with biologists around the world in an effort to combat malaria, which kills one million people annually.

Using an international computing grid spanning 27 nations, scientists analyze an average of 80,000 possible drug compounds against malaria every hour. In total, the network has processed more than 140 million compounds, with the United Kingdom's physics grid providing nearly half of the computing hours used.

The international WISDOM project, for World-wide In Silico Docking On Malaria, is designed to speed the search for anti-malarial drugs. The computers calculate the probability that molecules will dock with a target protein. That allows researchers to concentrate on testing only the most promising compounds.

The latest initiative, which began Oct. 1 and ended Wednesday, used the equivalent of 420 years of computing power from a single PC. Up to 5,000 computers were used simultaneously, generating a total of 2,000 gigabytes of data.

Most of the U.K.'s contribution came from GridPP, a computing Grid funded by Britain's Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council.

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