While you’re in a meeting today, or while you’re asleep tonight, your computer can help researchers find better childhood cancer treatments. The computer you use every day can contribute to groundbreaking research on AIDS, cancer, tuberculosis, the environment and other important issues.
How is this possible? IBM’s World Community Grid enables anyone to donate the spare computing power of their computers to help researchers find the next breakthrough. This IBM philanthropic initiative, winner of a 2016 People’s Voice Webby Award, is a safe, easy way to put an unused resource to work for good, without having any impact on your own use of your devices.
Why does this matter? Because in research, time is measured in money and lives. Quicker results mean quicker benefits for patients and more. And the enormous power of World Community Grid means that computer simulations that would have taken years can be completed in weeks or months. It’s even possible for researchers to run projects that are otherwise unaffordable or unimaginable, such as comparing all the genes from all the thousands of organisms in a soil sample, modeling water flows at atomic levels of detail, or searching through an enormous index of chemical compounds to find a treatment for the Zika virus.
Where your unused computing power could go
World Community Grid is the world’s largest volunteer computing initiative dedicated to tackling projects that benefit humanity.
World Community Grid essentially turns each connected device into one part of a massive virtual supercomputer. It breaks down complex research experiments into millions of smaller units and sends them to individual devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones to work on when they’re idle. The results are then collected and delivered to researchers.
By harnessing the unused computing power of more than 760,000 volunteers’ computers around the world, researchers can access dedicated computing time worth hundreds of millions of dollars and conduct research — research that could have taken years — in weeks or months.
At the forefront of the fight against childhood cancer
World Community Grid joined the battle against childhood cancer in 2009 with a project to search for new treatments for neuroblastoma, a common form of childhood cancer. Out of more than three million drug candidates screened by 200,000 volunteers, seven promising drug candidates with no apparent side effects were identified in 2013. Our latest project, Smash Childhood Cancer, is continuing this work and expanding the search for better treatments to include some of the most common childhood cancers.
A new partnership to improve rainfall forecasting
95% of agriculture in Africa depends on rainfall. The Africa Rainfall Project, which is World Community Grid's first partnership with The Weather Company will use data from computer simulations along with weather observations to help provide more accurate rainfall forecasts for sub-Saharan Africa. These more accurate forecasts can give farmers the crucial information they need to successfully raise their crops.
Nanotech joins the quest for clean water
A billion people lack access to clean water. Droughts decimate once-fertile farmlands. Ocean water is plentiful but, of course, too salty for most urgent needs. Now an international group of scientists, using the massive computing power contributed by 150,000 World Community Grid volunteers, has uncovered important new information about applying carbon nanotubes to water shortage issues. These tiny water filters have the potential to provide more affordable, efficient access to clean water — and contribute further to energy and medical research.
Working to stop one of the world’s deadliest diseases
Tuberculosis (TB) has plagued humans for thousands of years, yet it remains one of the world’s most dangerous diseases. About one-third of the world’s population harbors the TB bacterium, with 1.5 million infected people dying in 2014 alone. The World Health Organization now ranks TB alongside HIV as the world’s deadliest infectious disease. Researchers are using World Community Grid to help understand the molecular structure of the TB bacterium to come up with more effective treatments.
Helping develop affordable solar energy
In 2013 Harvard University announced the discovery of more than 35,000 compounds with the potential to double the rate of efficiency of most carbon-based solar cells in production today, after scanning more than 2.3 million materials on World Community Grid. Previously, carbon-based solar cells were made from a handful of highly efficient molecules that were painstakingly discovered one by one. Now, there are thousands more to explore: an exponential increase.
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