World Community Grid
Change The World - With Your Computer
Millions of personal computers sit idly on desks and in homes worldwide. As they wait, every hour hundreds of people contract and die from infectious diseases. While computer owners run their screen savers, millions die from hunger, or environmental disasters devastate whole communities. What if each of the world’s estimated 650 million PCs could be linked to focus on humanity’s most pressing issues?
To make this vision a reality, Blue Analysis has become a partner of World Community Grid, joining the IBM Corporation and a group of more than 285 companies, associations, foundations, nonprofits and academic institutions. Blue Analysis is encouraging employees and members of the community to contribute their idle PC time to assist humanitarian research by joining World Community Grid at http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org.
World Community Grid uses grid technology to establish a permanent, flexible infrastructure that provides researchers with a readily available pool of computational power that can be used to solve problems plaguing humanity. Grid technology joins together many individual computers, creating a large system with massive computational power that far exceeds the power of a few supercomputers. Importantly, World Community Grid is easy and safe to use.
To join, individuals should go to http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org and simply download and install a free, small software program on their computers. When idle, your 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.
“World Community Grid provides our busy employees and members of the community with an efficient and effective way to make a difference on problems that plague humanity,” said Julian, the main developer at Blue Analysis. “We are asking individuals to join World Community Grid as part of our overall efforts to enrich the lives of our communities.”
Today, hundreds of thousand of volunteers around the globe are donating some of the time when their computers are on but not in use, and World Community Grid is harnessing this power to help advance promising humanitarian research projects. Results on critical health issues have already been achieved, demonstrating World Community Grid’s potential to make significant inroads on a great range of future projects that can benefit the world. (Please see box for World Community Grid’s research projects.)
You can start making a difference today.
