IBM's World Community Grid Harnesses Idle Computer Time

IBM's World Community Grid Harnesses Idle Computer Time

Millions of personal computers sit idly on desks and homes worldwide. During this idle time, the mysteries of science and space continue to elude us. 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, The Center has become a partner of World Community Grid, joining the IBM Corporation and a group of leading associations, foundations, academic institutions and companies who are encouraging others to contribute their idle PC time to World Community Grid.

The idea of grid computing was first introduced in 1999. This rapidly emerging technology can bring together the collective power of thousands or millions of individual computers to create a giant “virtual” system with massive computational strength. Grid technology provides processing power far in excess of the world's largest supercomputers. Particularly in the world of scientific research, where finding sufficient computer time for computationally intensive research can be difficult, grid computing can solve myriad problems.

World Community Grid will harness the vast and unused computational power of the world's computers and direct it at research designed to help unlock genetic codes that underlie diseases like AIDS and HIV, Alzheimer's and cancer, improve forecasting of natural disasters and support studies that can protect the world's food and water supply.

Anyone can volunteer to donate the idle and unused time on a computer by downloading World Community Grid's free software and registering at www.worldcommunitygrid.org. When idle, computers will request data from World Community Grid's server, perform computations using this data, then send the results back to the server and prompt it for a new piece of work.

"World Community Grid represents a new model for philanthropic giving," said Linda Sanford, IBM senior vice president, Enterprise On Demand Transformation, and chairperson of World Community Grid's Advisory Board. "IBM is involved in World Community Grid because just as we do for clients, we're committed to bringing the best technologies forward to address critical societal and health issues. World Community Grid demonstrates that government, business, and society can be the direct beneficiary of innovation if we are willing to rethink the way innovation and science both develop and prosper."

IBM has donated the hardware, software, technical services and expertise to build the infrastructure for World Community Grid and provides hosting, maintenance and support.

IBM is joined in the project by United Devices, a leader in grid solutions, which plans to aggregate the idle power of participating PCs and laptops into its existing worldwide grid. IBM and United Devices previously worked together to create the Smallpox Research Grid, which created a grid of more than two million volunteers from 226 countries to speed the analysis of some 35 million drug molecules in the search for a treatment for Smallpox. Results were delivered to the U.S. Department of Defense for further study late last year.