World Community Grid, Big Thought is encouraging its supporters to contribute their idle PC time to assist humanitarian research by joining World Community Grid at . Click to Open Web Page

World Community Grid uses grid technology to establish a permanent, flexible infrastructure that provides researchers with a readily available pool of computational power that can be used to solve problems plaguing humanity. Grid technology joins together many individual computers, creating a large system with massive computational power that far exceeds the power of a few supercomputers. Importantly, World Community Grid is easy and safe to use. The project is supported by the IBM Corporation and a group of 160 companies, associations, foundations and academic institutions.

To join, supporters should go to Click to Open Web Page and simply download and install a free, small software program on their computers. When idle, your computers request data from World Community Grid’s server. Computers then perform computations using this data, send the results back to the server and prompt it for a new piece of work.

“World Community Grid provides an opportunity to contribute idle resources to make a difference in a new and innovative way.

In its first year, World Community Grid ran the Human Proteome Folding Project, which provided scientists with data on how individual proteins within the human body affect human health, enabling them to develop new cures for diseases like lyme disease, malaria and tuberculosis. Scientists now have descriptions of 120,000 protein domains that are critical to human well-being; without the benefit of this free grid technology, it would have taken 5 years to get these results, compared with just 12 months on World Community Grid.

More recently, World Community Grid launched FightAIDS@Home. FightAIDS@Home, which is sponsored by The Scripps Research Institute, is using computational methods to identify new candidate drugs to block HIV protease, a key molecular structure that when blocked, stops the virus from maturing and thus is a way of avoiding the onset of AIDS and prolonging life.

Possible future projects will address global humanitarian issues, such as new and existing infectious disease research; genomic and disease research; and natural disasters and hunger. Big Thought is asking that supporters who join World Community Grid become a member of the Big Thought team. Please go to Click to Open Web Page and become a member today. Copyright 2004, Big Thought, All Rights Reserved