IBM's World Community Grid

 


Background

In November 2004, IBM launched World Community Grid. World Community Grid will be the largest public computing grid that benefis humanity.

The Web site, www.worldcommunitygrid.org, already boasts well over 190,000 registered members and over 341,000 devices. By harnessing the “idle time” of millions of home and workplace PCs, World Community Grid establishes a permanent, flexible infrastructure to provide researchers with an available pool of computational power to solve problems plaguing humanity. World Community Grid is built upon an IBM infrastructure and with IBM support.

World Community Grid invites nonprofit organizations to use its powerful grid technology at no cost for projects that benefit humanity.

Grid technology enables researchers to access tremendous amounts of power, exceeding that of several supercomputers, to run complex computations and to accelerate the pace of their research. Research results must be made available to the global research community and will be made available on World Community Grid's Web site.

How World Community Grid Makes a Difference

World Community Grid supports research that is

* Focused on solving problems to benefit humanity;
* Conducted by public or nonprofit organizations;
* Contributed to the public domain; and
* Accelerated by grid computing technology.

Over the last year, World Community Grid ran the Human Proteome Folding Project, which has been providing scientists with data on how individual proteins within the human body affect human health, enabling them to develop new cures for diseases like lyme disease, malaria and tuberculosis.

In 2005, World Community Grid launched FightAIDS@Home, which is sponsored by the Scripps Research Institute. It is using computational methods to identify new candidate drugs to block HIV protease, a key molecular structure that when blocked, stops the virus from maturing, and may help prolong a person's life.

Get Involved

To be successful, World Community Grid needs people's unused computer time. The power of millions of computers working together will help researchers make significant inroads on problems plaguing humanity, including human disease and environmental disasters. Downloading the software application is free, safe and easy and will not interfere with normal computer processing.

To join, members simply download and install a free, small software program on their computers. When idle, computers request data from World Community Grid’s server. Computers then perform computations using this data, send the results back to the server and prompt it for a new piece of work.

Join World Community Grid today and help humanity.