Public volunteer computing in dental science: A lesson learned from
the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI@Home) to battle
against COVID-19 (Folding@home)
Jafar Kolahi
Independent Research Scientist, Founder of Dental Hypotheses, Isfahan, Iran.
David G. Dunning
Department of Oral Biology, College of Dentistry, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Lincoln, Nebraska,
USA.
Alex Piskun
Independent Research Scientist, Founder of BOINC Synergy Team and a previous member of BOINC project,
Toronto, Canada.
Saber Khazaei
Department of Endodontics, School of Dentistry, Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences, Kermanshah, Iran.
Pedram Iranmanesh
Department of Endodontics, Dental Research Center, Dental Research Institute, School of Dentistry, Isfahan
University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran.
Parisa Soltani
Department of Raidiology, School of Dentistry, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran.
Maryam Tofanghchiha
Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology, Dental Caries Prevention Research Center, Qazvin University of
Medical Sciences, Qazvin, Iran
Romeo Patini
Department of Head, Neck and Sense Organs of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Rome, Italy
Geatano Isola
Department of General Surgery and Surgical-Medical Specialties, University of Catania: Catania, Italy.
Abstract
SETI@home was a well-known groundbreaking public volunteer computing
(P.V.C) project in which 5.2 million participants donated their computers' unused
resources to analyze radio signals from space to find extraterrestrial intelligence.
Folding@home is another P.V.C project, aimed at fighting COVID-19, accessing more
computing power than all top-500 of the world’s supercomputers combined. Despite
several advantages of P.V.C projects such as low cost, this approach has yet to be
used in dentistry. The authors strongly encourage the use of this innovative technology
by dental researchers and clinicians.
Keywords: public volunteer computing, dentistry, extraterrestrial intelligence, COVID19, BOINC and distributed computing
Graphical Abstract
Search for
extraterrestrial
intelligence
SETI@home
1990-2020
Public volunteer
computing
Fight against
COVID-19
Folding@home
Since 2020
Public volunteer
computing in dental
science
Caries@home
Introduction
In silico studies have recently played a major role in the growth of
biomedical sciences. The expression is pseudo-Latin for in silicon which
refers to the fact that a computer’s central processing unit (C.P.U) is a
silicon integrated circuit. A PubMed query on April 15, 2021, with search
term “in silico” [All Fields] showed an exponentially increasing number of
publications (Number of article = 0.07year2 - 0.7452year - 1.0366, R² =
0.84).1 The increasing demand for in silico studies has given birth to new
terms such as “in silico drug discovery” and “in silico gene expression”. For
instance, a recent in silico study discovered a new antibiotic known as
Halicin. Halicin is structurally divergent from conventional antibiotics and
exhibits a wide range of bactericidal activity.2 However, in silico studies
generally require high performance computing which are mainly provided
by supercomputers of well-known large companies such as Amazon and
Google at relatively high cost. An innovative solution to reach high
performance computing is public volunteer computing (P.V.C), in which
volunteers donate their computer's unused resources to a scientific project.
We intend to discuss the use of PVC in dental science and follow in the
footsteps of other successful PVC projects such as The Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI@home) and the battle against COVID-19
(Folding@home).
Search for extraterrestrial intelligence
The hypothetical intelligent life beyond earth is known as extraterrestrial
intelligence (often abbreviated ETI). On earth, all known terrestrial living
organisms have a carbon-based life. ETI may be a non-carbon-based life
such as zinc world.34 A recent scientific article forecasted there should be
a minimum of ∼36 (range: 2 to 211) communicating ETIs in the galaxy
today.5 Obviously, tooth structure of non-carbon-based life remains a
mystery.67
Search for extraterrestrial intelligence is abbreviated SETI. Established in
1984, the SETI Institute is a non-profit research organization located in the
Silicon Valley near the NASA Ames Research Center. A well-known
worldwide SETI effort was radio-SETI which aimed to analyze cosmos
electromagnetic signals and search for signs of probable ETI in the other
planets. Owing to the voluminous amount of data, SETI@home was
released in 1999 as a groundbreaking P.V.C project in which people
donate their computers' unused resources to analyze radio signals from
space. With over 5.2 million participants worldwide, SETI@home reached
an unprecedented computing power and led to a unique public involvement
in science.89 Disappointingly though perhaps not surprisingly, the project
has never found ETI and went into hibernation after more than 20 years.10
A recent scientific forecast showed if ∼2,900 communicating ETI exist in
the universe, with our nearest neighbor at a maximum distance of ∼1,880
light-years, then ∼700 years would be required for SETI to detect just one
ETI.5
SETI@home represents a well-organized, unparalleled success in
leveraging the power of P.V.C. In addition, its inspiration applied to other
domains, from cryptocurrency mining such as Bitcoin to Ethereum to vast
multiplayer video games.10
However, SETI@home worked alongside with BOINC, the Berkeley Open
Infrastructure for Network Computing. It is software that can use
CPU and GPU cycles to do scientific computing when one individual does
not use his/her computer. A BOINC app also exists for Android. BOINC is
providing support for many computationally intensive projects in a wide
range of disciplines.11 The rise of machine learning, protein folding,
molecular docking, computational biology, climate prediction, etc., requires
huge amounts of computing power to carry out and open up new
perspectives for internet-based P.V.C.
Fight against COVID-19
Currently, BOINC-based P.V.C is being used successfully to combat the
ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The
SiDock@home offers a new exemplar focused on the discovery of possible
drugs against COVID-19. Researchers in this project are using molecular
docking techniques to find ligands that can successfully bind to protein
targets (3CLpro_v3, corona_PLpro_v1, corona_PLpro_v2 and
corona_RdRp_v1) and inactivate COVID-19. Other BOINC-based projects
working to fight against COVID-19 are: Rosetta@home, ibercivis BOINC
and OpenPandemics-COVID-19 (hosted by the IBM's World Community
Grid).
Another well-known P.V.C project trying to fight against COVID-19 is
Folding@home. This is a non-BOINC-based projects and uses Cosm, an
open distributed computing software. Another non-BOINC-based P.V.C
project trying zeroing in on the fight against COVID-19 is the DreamLab, a
mobile Android and iOS app launched in 2015 by Imperial College
London and the Vodafone Foundation.
Methods
We searched Scopus database with the keyword “public volunteer
computing” in April 2, 2021 and found 148 articles. Bibliometric
examinations involved co-authorship, author’s keyword co-occurrence and
co-citation network analyses using VOSviewer 1.6.16 (Centre for Science
and Technology Studies, Leiden University). BOINC was the most popular
author’s keyword, the U.S was the most active country and Future
Generation Computer Systems was the most active journal. Interestingly,
well-known journals such as Science, Nature and J.A.M.A (The Journal of
the American Medical Association) are well active in field of P.V.C (Figure
1). Among universities the University of Oxford was the most active
university followed by, the University of Melbourne and the University of
Ostrava.
To find current status of P.V.C in Twittersphere, recent tweets related to
#VolunteerComputing, #BOINC and #DistributedComputing obtained from
Twitter API in April 7, 2021 and analyzed via Orange, a data mining
toolbox in python (www.orangedatamining.com). Text of tweets
summarized via word cloud, characteristics of related Twitter accounts
assessed via the Ekman’s (multi-class) classification of emotion, and
sentiment analysis was carried out to find 4 features of Vader method
including: positive score, negative score, neutral score and compound.
Results
#BOINC was the most popular word, joy was most prevalent emotion of
Twitter accounts, and neutral was the most common sentimental feature of
tweets (Figure 2).
Currently several revolutionary P.V.C projects such as OpenZika,
FightAIDS@Home, Outsmart Ebola Together, Say No to Schistosoma, GO
Fight Against Malaria, Drug Search for Leishmaniasis, Influenza Antiviral
Drug Search, Help Conquer Cancer, Mapping Cancer Markers, etc. are
going forward or completed successfully.12
(A)
(B)
(C)
Figure 1. Density visualizations of hot topics (A) and network visualizations
of active countries (B) and journals (C) with the most impact in scientific
productions related to P.V.C. The distance-based approach was used to
create this map, which means the smaller the distance between two terms,
the higher their relatedness.
(A)
(B)
(C)
Figure 2. Twitter analysis regarding current status of P.V.C. Text of tweets
summarized in word cloud. During text preprocessing, all urls, accents,
parse html removed and all text turned to lowercase. During tokenization a
pre-trained Twitter model split the text, which keeps hashtags, emoticons
and other special symbols (A). Emotion probabilities of Twitter accounts
involved statistically significant difference (B). Predicted sentiment for each
tweet visualized by heat map. Also clustered visualization utilized where
similar tweets are grouped together. Neutral was the most common
sentimental feature (mean = 0.930) followed by compound (mean = 0.084),
positive (mean = 0.043), and negative (mean = 0.027) (C).
Discussion
Limitations and Advantages of public volunteer computing projects
In addition to privacy and security concerns, the main criticism for P.V.C is
a lack of published results.13 A majority of peer-reviewed publications
related to BOINC projects, focused solely on the technical aspect of
distributed computing, include no analysis and dissemination of the
computed results
(https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Publications_by_BOINC_projects).
The Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing has been monitoring the
economic profits of P.V.C, and reported that US $20 million has been
saved since it launched CAS@home in September 2010, by consuming
donated computing power rather than purchasing it from a company such
as Amazon.14
P.V.C can reach an unbelievable computing power. During the COVID-19
pandemic, the Folding@home network grew massively. Over a million
volunteers have pooled their computer resources to combat COVID-19;
and Folding@home had even accessed more computing power than all
top-500 of the world’s supercomputers together could provide.
Folding@home became 15x faster than any current supercomputers such
as IBM Summit.15
In the OpenPandemics-COVID-19 P.V.C project, more than 798,000
volunteers have so far achieved the equivalent of 70,000 years’ worth of
computing (by way of explanation, a single-processor PC would need to
work that long to complete the computations) and Identified 70 chemical
compounds, from a large collection of 80 million molecule candidates to
fight against COVID-19 in a short time.16
Public volunteer computing in dental science
It is widely acknowledged that dental caries and periodontal diseases are
among the most prevalent infectious diseases among humankind from
pediatric to geriatric patients, negatively impacting quality of life. A review
of the list of P.V.C project showed no dental activity in this two decade’s old
scientific field.17 A P.V.C project can be used in dentistry to discover
possible ligands against well-known proteins of influential oral pathogens
such as Streptococcus mutans, Porphyromonas
gingivalis and Enterococcus faecalis. For instance, 110 proteins of
Streptococcus mutans were predicted to be druggable.18
Dental P.V.C also could be used for machine learning and image
processing for dental researchers.1920 Dental professionals could potentially
up-load their X-ray images and donate their unused CPU and GPU cycles
to do scientific computing such as convolutional neural network image
processing.
BOINC or IBM's World Community Grid could be used easily to setup the
first P.V.C dental project, such as caries@home. One hundred and ten
proteins of Streptococcus mutans could be considered as the target.18 Two
hundred thirty million purchasable ligands in ready-to-dock, 3D formats
cloud be virtually screened via ZINC 15 database.21. If well-known
international dental organizations such as the British Dental Association,
the International Association for Dental Research (IADR), the American
Dental Association (ADA), the FDI World Dental Federation, etc. support
caries@home and, in turn, dental students, researchers, clinical
practitioners, and members of public join to caries@home, the dental
research community will experience the first ground-breaking P.V.C dental
project.
Conclusion
P.V.C projects, which date back to the mid-1990s, have been utilized
successfully to make extensive processing power for in silico scientific
researches in a wide range of disciplines at minimal cost. Despite several
advantages of P.V.C projects, this approach has yet to be used in dentistry.
The authors strongly encourage the use of this new technology by dental
researchers and clinicians. By way of illustration, even though X-rays were
discovered in 1895, dental radiology was not launched as a fundamental
diagnostic tool until 1913.22 23
Acknowledgment
We would like to thank Prof. Edward F. Rossomando for his advice and
recommendations.
Financial support and sponsorship
Nil.
Conflicts of interest
The authors reported no conflicts of interest. Kolahi J. is a volunteer of
SiDock@Home and OpenPandemics-COVID-19. Piskun A. was a previous
member of the BOINC project.
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