The joint effort by IBM and the Cancer Institute of New Jersey works by digitalizing medical diagnoses on the World Community Grid (WCG). What are the advantages and disadvantages of relying on a volunteer based network such as this? Provide examples of both. Visit the Web site of the WCG to inform your answer.

Advantages

Business benefits
Improve efficiency by improving computational capabilities.
Bring together not only IT but also people
Create flexible, resilient operational infrastructures
Address rapid fluctuations in customer demands

Technology benefits
Federate data and distribute it globally.
Support large multi-disciplinary collaboration across organizations and business.
Enable recovery and failure.
Ability to run large-scale applications comprising thousands of computes, for wide range of applications.
Reduces signal latency – the delay that builds up as data are transmitted over the Internet.



In the long run, this would be much cheaper because they don’t need big servers or powerful CPU to store data.


Since the grid computing will be a powerful tool, they can have a good understanding of the process and classify them accordingly


The doctors can make an accurate comparison therefore they can treat the patient in a timely manner.

It enables doctors to diagnose cancers more quickly, and detect their growth or shrinkage more accurately during treatment.

Digitalizing images allows for doctors to turn the images into comparable numbers, because now, they have turned the images into bits and bytes. The database in itself will soon be capable of holding hundreds of thousands, if not millions of these images at once. As a result, doctors will be able to collect the data (the images,) and conduct information from that data. The information from these images will essentially create an opportunity for experts to gain knowledge of the disease, which will help the world as a whole battle cancer more effectively in the long run. This will also enable the doctors to compare the new images of patients with those that were already in the database. Treatments will be personalized based on how previous patients’ reactions to various treatments.


Disadvantages

Resource sharing is further complicated when grid is introduced as a solution for utility computing where commercial applications and resources become available as shareable and on demand resources.

The concept of commercial on-demand shareable adds new, more difficult challenges to the already complicated grid problem list including service level features, accounting, usage metering, flexible pricing, federated security, scalability, and open-ended integration.

Some applications may need to be tweaked to take full advantage of the new model.

Licensing across many servers may make it prohibitive for some apps. Vendors are starting to be more flexible with environment like this.

Possibility of the system being hacked or hit by a “millennium bug” therefore they can lose database.

The computers that are actually performing the calculations might not be entirely trustworthy.