World Community Grid

Millions of personal computers sit idly on desks and in 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?

World Community Grid is making this dream a reality. Launched by the IBM Corporation in November 2004, World Community Grid uses grid technology to harness the plentiful, underutilized resource of PCs and laptops worldwide to support humanitarian research.

Today, hundreds of thousand of volunteers around the globe are donating computational power 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.

Grid computing joins together many individual computers, creating a large system with massive computational power that far surpasses the power of several supercomputers. Because the work is split into small pieces that can be processed simultaneously, research time is reduced from years to months. The technology is also more cost-effective, enabling better use of critical funds.

There have been smaller examples of pioneering uses of grid technology for humanitarian projects. However, most grid efforts required the scientific community to solicit volunteers and establish a new grid infrastructure before running each project. These endeavors were supported by highly specialized infrastructures that could not be easily reused for other types of projects.

World Community Grid, in contrast, establishes a permanent, flexible infrastructure. This strategy removes the initial time-consuming obstacles and provides researchers with the ongoing and much larger pool of available resources to responsively address the most pressing global scientific challenges.

World Community Grid is available only to public and not-for-profit organizations to use in humanitarian research that might otherwise not be completed due to the high cost of the computer infrastructure required in the absence of a public grid. As part of IBM’s commitment to advancing human welfare, all results must be published in the public domain and made public to the global research community.

To contribute their unused computer time, individuals go to www.worldcommunitygrid.org and simply download and install a small software program on their computers. No new hardware or software is required. When idle, their computers request data from World Community Grid’s server. These computers then perform computations using this data, then send the results back to the server and prompt it for a new piece of work. Importantly, World Community Grid is easy, safe and free to use.

Grid computing—an on demand business environment—can expand capacity to meet growing and challenging requirements. The technology behind grid computing comprises world-class, open IBM ® servers and IBM storage products that include middleware like IBM WebSphere®, IBM DB2® and IBM Tivoli.®

“For our business customers, we bring our best technology and talent to bear on their business problems. We do the same thing in the community, addressing educational, social and humanitarian concerns,” said Stanley S. Litow, president, IBM International Foundation and vice president, IBM Corporate Citizenship & Corporate Affairs. “World Community Grid applies the On Demand Business strategy to global philanthropy and humanitarian issues. It’s an exciting concept and we look forward to working with [IBM Business Partners] and volunteers to execute the vision.”

Besides individuals who contribute the unused cycle time of their computers, other leaders in the corporate, not-for-profit and academic communities are teaming with World Community Grid and encouraging their employees, members, students and faculty to participate.