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Two seemingly unrelated facts: One, hundreds of millions of personal computers are, at times, sitting idly on desks and in homes worldwide. And two, there are mysteries of science, human health, and space that continue to elude us. IBM stopped to consider what could be accomplished if it brought together these two items -- what if each of the world's estimated 650 million PCs could be linked to focus on humanity's most pressing issues?
In November, 2004, IBM, along with representatives of the world's leading science, education and philanthropic organizations, 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 is a new model for philanthropic giving. People and organizations can donate the unused processing power and time of their personal or business computers. IBM wants to bring the best technologies, which it employs for clients, 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 is currently working with 40 partners and so far more than 150,000 members have donated computing power and more than 18,000 computer run years have been harvested. To donate your personal computer's unused processing power, to become a partner, or to submit a research project that could benefit from enormous computing power, go to www.worldcommunitygrid.com.
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. More information can be found at www.worldcommunitygrid.org/projects_showcase/human_proteome
Further projects are to be selected by a 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 advisory board of World Community Grid includes members of some of the world's most prestigious scientific, research and charitable organizations, including the National Institutes of Health, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Markle Foundation, the Mayo Clinic, Oxford University, the World Health Organization and the United Nations Development Programme.
IBM has donated the hardware, software, technical services and expertise to build the infrastructure for World Community Grid and provides hosting, maintenance and support.
In addition, 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.
Every computer in use around the world could be a potential participant in World Community Grid. Grid computing, which provides processing power far in excess of the world's largest supercomputers, is a rapidly emerging technology that can bring together the collective power of thousands or millions of individual computers to create a giant virtual system with massive computational strength.
World Community Grid is built from computing time donated by thousands of IBM employees, as well as scores of PCs and laptops from computer users around the world. World Community Grid is powered by IBM technology, which includes IBM eServer p630 and x345 systems and IBM's Shark Enterprise Storage Server running IBM DB2 database software and the AIX and Linux operating systems. IBM DB2 software can support millions of SQL queries a day as it manages the data provided by potentially millions of computers working in concert. For more information about grid computing, visit www.ibm.com/grid
