Google recently announced the recipients of the Google Exacycle for Visiting Faculty academic awards program. This is not your usual prize with a large pile of money being offered to the winners, the prize is rather more interesting. Google is offering the recipients up to one billion core-hours of computation (a couple of decades of computer time for a standard computer). Google’s criteria for the selection of
projects was that it should be of benefit to humanity, and the project should need a 100 million core-hours or more to complete in the first place. The award program was launched back in 2011 and since then Google has selected the projects and have seven scientists working at Google’s offices in Mountain View and Seattle. The scientists have access to Google’s infrastructure for running their experiments. The projects that have received the award are:
- Simulating a Dynamic Universe with the Large Synoptic Sky Survey Jeff Gardner, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
- Designing and Defeating Antibiotic Drug Resistance Peter Kasson, Assistant Professor, Departments of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics and of Biomedical Engineering, University of Virginia
- Sampling the conformational space of G protein-coupled receptors Kai Kohlhoff, Research Scientist at Google
- Modeling transport through the nuclear pore complex Daniel Russel, post doc in structural biology, University of California, San Francisco
- Large scale screening for new drug leads that modulate the activity of disease-relevant proteins James Swetnam, Scientific Software Engineer, drugable.org, NYU School of Medicine
- Protein Structure Prediction and Design Michael Tyka, Research Fellow, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
You can find more about these projects and other avenues of research being conducted by Google under the Exascale project from the announcement at the Google Research blog.
