Distributed computing: the Clean Energy Project
World Community Grid and the Clean Energy Project are assembling a virtual laboratory to build thousands of organic compounds in order to discover those that are the best candidates for future solar cell research. With the aid of World Community Grid, new molecular materials with specific properties will be designed in software, instead of having to actually synthesize and test the molecules in an actual chemical experiment. Thus rather than measuring the response of the molecules to sunlight, scientists from the Aspuru-Guzik group at Harvard University will be able to look at their calculated molecular properties and estimate their performance as solar cells. To be successful, they will need to achieve the highest levels of accuracy available with current computational chemistry methods - and must do so for tens of thousands of molecules.