Five big ideas

High-throughput applications are problems that can be divided into many independent tasks. Computing grids can be used to schedule these tasks, dealing them out to the different computer processors in the grid. As soon as a processor finishes one task, the next task arrives. In this way, hundreds of tasks can be performed in a very short time.

Examples of high-throughput applications include:

• The analysis of thousands of particle collisions in a bid to understand more about our universe, as in the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid
• The analysis of thousands of molecules in a bid to discover a drug candidate against a specific malaria protein, as part of the grid-enabled WISDOM project
   
• The analysis of thousands of protein folding configurations in a bid to discover more efficient ways of packaging drug proteins, using Rosetta software in the Open Science Grid
   
• The use of volunteer computing to power applications including SETI@home, which aids in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence; FightAIDS@home, which models the evolution of drug resistance and helps to design new anti-HIV drugs, or BRaTS@home, which works on Gravitational Ray Tracing. These "@home" tasks involved are totally independent, so it doesn't matter whether some tasks take a long time. After a "time-out" period, unfinished tasks are simply sent elsewhere to be processed.