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Print Edition StoriesMonday, December 8, 2008
IBM, Harvard to use home computers to make better solar cells
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In an effort to discover new organic materials for creating more efficient solar cells, IBM Corp. and Harvard University have partnered with the World Community Grid to enlist the processing power of PC users worldwide.
The World Community Grid is a humanitarian computing grid with 413,000-plus members in more than 200 countries. It represents more than one million computers. By installing sharing software on each computer, the membership is able to operate as a “virtual grid,” combining the computing power of machines not in use. The group has already used the virtual grid for several world organizations, including Nutritious Rice for the World AfricanClimate@Home.
The project by IBM and Harvard will examine organic materials capable of being used in low-cost, high-efficiency photovoltaics. Each compound to be examined would require 100 days of computational time to examine under standard procedures, according to Alan Aspuru-Guzik, the principal investigator and a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard. Using the community grid, project organizers can complete in two years what would take 22 years on an enterprise server.
New York-based IBM will also pilot the World Community Grid on a new IBM internal cloud — a network of services and software — when that cloud is not being fully used. In the future, IBM plans to expand this capability to clients of IBM cloud-computing services if they choose, so that they can become part of this humanitarian research, according to the company.
The search for a better solar cell compound is based on the known principals of silicon, the current standard. Current silicon-based solar cells are only about 20 percent efficient and cost about $3 per watt of electricity generated, according to project officials, and the group is hoping to find a better solution among organic compounds.
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