World Community Grid: The Human Proteome Folding project
The Boinc software application (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/), developed in the University of California, Berkley, allows every personal computer to use its unused computational power to solve tasks automatically downloaded from the Internet from projects benefitting humanity like the World Community Grid (supported by IBM http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/). Global statistics about the WCGrid can be found at http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/stat/viewGlobal.do.
WCGrid is a virtual supercomputer who’s power will help address whole range of humanitarian concerns from healthcare, AIDS, cancer, finding better strains of rice that are more nutritious. It is an amazing opportunity for people to get involved in humanitarian issues. WCGrid is doing a study of all of the proteins in rice to come up with stronger strains of rice to improve the World food supply.
IBM’s innovation technology allows people to donate the unused power of their individual computers to address problems in the world and this is a new level of contribution-donating something that costs nothing to the donors, that they do not use and can make change in the world.
A huge work is invested to secure the widely open volunteer system. There are people in IBM called “ethical hackers” who are paid to try to hack the open access grid.
WCGrid is harvesting spare processing time from computers around the world using that computing power to accelerate research. One half of a million years of computer time has been already donated to important research projects in the WCGrid.
Explaination about World Community Grid by IBM’s How it works at http://www.ibm.com/podcasts/howitworks/021307/index.shtml
Human Proteome Folding Explained
