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The World Community Grid is an effort to create the world's largest public computing grid to tackle projects that benefit humanity. It is primarily run by IBM and currently available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X operating systems.
How it works
The World Community Grid software uses the idle time of Internet-connected desktop computers and applies this computing power toward the advancement of humanity.
The grid works like a screen saver: When your computer is idle, the grid goes to work, performing tasks from the grid. When you use your computer, the grid waits until you are done. When your computer is idle again, the grid resumes its work.
Previous public computing grids such as SETI@home or Genome@home have been devoted to a single project. The Community Grid will eventually support many different humanitarian projects.
Within the grid, users may join teams that have been created by organizations, groups, or individuals. Teams allow for a heightened sense of community identity and attempts to inspire competitiveness.
History
Announced November 16, 2004 by IBM, the World Community Grid uses both the grid technology from United Devices Inc. which powers grid.org projects as well as the BOINC grid technology which powers the Seti%40home and Climateprediction and many other projects.
The initial project was the Human Proteome Folding Project (HPF project) which is also run simultaneously as a grid.org project. However, IBM has stated that all future projects will be exclusive to the World Community Grid.
On November 16, 2005 World Community Grid launched FightAids@Home. The previous HPF project and FightAids@Home can also now both be a BOINC-based project.
On July 11, 2006 World Community Grid now has over 200,100 members running instances of World Community Grid on over 364,000 machines, and has run a total process time equivalent to over 48,546 years.
Versions are available for Linux, Windows, and Mac.
Slashdot
On December 30, 2004, as the grid approached 50,000 machines, the cooperative weblog Slashdot ran a blurb containing a clever reference to the Slashdot Users team on the grid. Within hours, the team had grown from a modest 79 members to almost 3,000. Before this, the largest team was one set up by IBM, with a membership of around 370 members. As of March 10th, 2006, the Slashdot team has 3,602 members.
Projects
One project is the Human Proteome Folding Project, or HPF1, which aims to predict the structure of human proteins. Devised by Richard Bonneau at the Institute for Systems Biology, the project will use the Grid to produce the likely structures for each of the proteins using a Rosetta Score. From these predictions, researchers hope to predict the function of the myriad proteins. This increased understanding of the human proteins should prove vital in the search for cures to human diseases.
Another project, called FightAIDS@Home, was launched on the World Community Grid on November 15, 2005. Each individual computer processes one potential drug molecule and tests how well it would dock with HIV protease, acting as a protease inhibitor. This project represents the beginning of targeting at specific diseases by the Grid.
The newest project, Human Proteome Folding 2, was released on June 23, 2006. This project, released as HPF1 neared an end, focuses on human-secreted proteins, with special focus on biomarkers and the proteins on the surface of cells as well as Plasmodium, the organism that causes malaria.
Unlike the previous projects, HPF2 uses higher resolution models of proteins, which are much more useful, but those also require higher-end computers.
See also
- List of distributed computing projects
- Distributed computing
- BOINC
- Folding@home
- distributed.net
- grid.org
External links
Distributed computing | Protein structure
World Community Grid | World Community Grid | World Community Grid | World Community Grid | World Community Grid
"World Community Grid"