How would you like to contribute to world medical research and help find cures for some of the diseases affecting millions of people worldwide? You can do this simply by using some spare time on your home PC. It doesn’t cost you anything (apart from some power to run the PC).
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?
To make this vision a reality, Southern Table Tennis has become a partner of World Community GridTM,
joining the IBM Corporation and a group of leading associations, foundations,
academic institutions and companies.
World Community Grid establishes a permanent, flexible infrastructure that provides researchers with a readily available pool of computational power that can be used to solve problems plaguing humanity. Importantly, World Community Grid is easy and safe to use.
What is grid technology?
Grid technology joins together many individual computers, creating a large
system with massive computational power that exceeds the power of a few
supercomputers. This capability can be applied, on a global scale, to very
large and complex problems for the benefit of humanity.
To join, members 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.
If you have broadband, this happens without you knowing or doing anything. If you have dialup, the communication with the server takes place automatically when you connect to view your emails, or use the net.
World Community Grid will address global humanitarian
issues, such as:
• New and existing infectious disease research: Researching cures for HIV and
AIDS,
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), malaria and others.
• Genomic and disease research: The Human Proteome Folding project—World
Community Grid’s first project—seeks to help identify the functions of the
proteins that are coded by human genes.
• Natural disasters and hunger: World Community Grid applications can help
researchers and scientists with earthquake predictions, improving crop yields
and evaluating the supply of critical natural resources like water.
The benefits are proven. In 2003, the IBM Corporation was one of the sponsors of a smallpox study that took advantage of grid computing. This study, using today’s largest available super computers, would have taken years to complete. With grid computing, this study was completed in less than six months and identified 45 potential smallpox-treatment candidates.
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.
If you would like to find out more, you can look on www.worldcommunitygrid.org. You can also look for ‘world community grid’ with your favorite search engine and see what many other people are saying and make up your own mind about the project.
If you decide to join, then it is very simple:
- go to www.worldcommunitygrid.org and download the software (you will be asked to enter a userid and password of your choosing).
- when you are asked if you want to join a team, you can join the Southern team (all you need to do is enter ‘southern’ in the search prompt and you will see our team). Alternatively, you can go to www.worldcommunitygrid.org/team/viewTeamInfo.do?teamId=N1ZP9KHQGQ1 and click the ‘Join Now’ button.
Please feel free to tell your family, friends and work colleagues about this project, and encourage them to join.
If you have any more questions, then please send an email to stta2@southerntabletennis.org.au and we will try to find the answer for you.
WORLD COMMUNITY GRID, the name and logo, are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the U.S., other countries, or both, and are used under license.