The World Community Grid has brought hundreds of thousands of people and millions of computers together from across the globe to create the largest non-profit computing grid benefiting humanity. It does this by pooling surplus computer processing power from users’ PCs. Although the PC will be the minority participant in the networked world compared to tablets and smartphones, there are millions of PCs out there and most of them are utilized a very small percentage of the time. Don’t throw any PC’s away — connect them to the World Community Grid, and let your spare computational capacity be deployed toward finding a cure for cancer and other diseases.
Grid computing has been around longer than cloud computing. It joins together many individual computers using the Internet, creating a large system with massive computational power that far surpasses the power of a handful of supercomputers. Because the work is split into small pieces that can be processed simultaneously, research time is reduced from decades to months. It is very easy to get involved in this–its very similar to installing a screensaver. Just visit worldcommunitygrid.org and in a few minutes you will be helping the world. When your PC is idle, the unused computing capacity is used by the World Community Grid to work on difficult computational problems. At the end of this story is a list of the projects you can choose from when you donate the idle time of your PC.
Thanks to the large number of contributors, computations have recently been completed for several projects, with a couple more wrapping up within the next few weeks. In most cases, the research teams will now comb through the massive number of raw results and write up their analyses for publication. In the meantime, the World Community Grid folks have new projects in the pipeline, including one from the researchers at the Ontario Cancer Institute (the team responsible for Help Conquer Cancer).
It is gratifying to visit your My Projects page and select which of the available projects you’d like to support! If you have not done so, make a visit to the World Community Grid website.
Help Fight Childhood Cancer
Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy – Phase 2
The Clean Energy Project – Phase 2
Computing for Clean Water
FightAIDS@Home
Human Proteome Folding – Phase 2
Help Conquer Cancer