By some estimates, there are more than 650 million PCs in use around the world. Even on a busy day, most of these computers are used only a fraction of the day. What if there was a way to harness their unused capacity for some productive purpose?

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.

Now IBM, along with representatives of the world's leading science, education and philanthropic organizations, has launched World Community Grid, a global humanitarian effort that applies the unused computing power of individual and business computers to help address the world's most difficult health and societal 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.

"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."

The first project of World Community Grid, the Human Proteome Folding Project, is sponsored by the Institute for Systems Biology, an internationally known non-profit research institute dedicated to the study and application of systems biology. The Human Proteome Folding Project hopes to identify the proteins that make up the Human Proteome and, in doing so, better understand the causes and potential cures for diseases like malaria and tuberculosis.

Further projects are to be selected by a newly created World Community Grid Advisory Board that will evaluate proposals from leading research, public and not-for-profit organizations seeking to conduct humanitarian research using grid computing technology. The Board is expected to oversee five to six projects a year.

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.