- What if the idle time of each of the world’s estimated 650 million PCs could be linked to focus on humanity’s most pressing issues?
- What if scientists could access this extraordinary computational power and dramatically accelerate the pace of research from years to months?
World Community Grid
At IBM, “Innovation that matters for the world” is one of our core values. It drives everything we do as we lead in the invention, development and manufacture of the industry's most advanced information technologies, and is at the heart of our work to improve the communities where our customers and employees live and work.
In November 2005, IBM announced an important new initiative called World Community Grid. World Community Grid’s mission is to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. 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 such as human disease, environmental problems and hunger.
FightAIDS@Home
FightAIDS@Home, 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.
How do I...
Propose a Research Project
Research the Grid Supports
Contacts
- , Director, Corporate Community Relations, IBM
- Project Executive, IBM
- Focused on solving problems to benefit humanity.
- Conducted by public or nonprofit organizations.
- Accelerated by grid computing technology.
- Contributes direct results to public domain.
Research That Can Benefit from Grid Technology
- Requires massive computational power, exceeding that of several supercomputers.
- Employs computations and data which can be accelerated and partitioned to use millions of computer processing units (CPUs), running independently.
Examples of Research Fields
- New and existing infectious disease research: Development of treatments for HIV/AIDS, Malaria, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), etc.
- Genomics and disease: Functions of proteins that are coded by human genes and how they might relate to cures for common diseases.
- Natural disasters and hunger: Earthquake warnings, information on improving crop yields and livestock production, and evaluation of the supply of critical natural resources such as water.
- Environmental research: Meteorology and severe weather, pollution remediation, climate modeling, etc.
Benefits
- Access to extraordinary computational power not available without grid technology– at no cost
- Use of a secure infrastructure that is already built and in operation
- Use of IBM technology, support, and expertise
- Assistance boarding research programs onto grid
- Exposure to World Community Grid’s expert Advisory Board, partnerorganizations, and members
Submit Research here
Become a Partner
Ways to engage
- Place IBM-provided story on your organization’s Internet/Intranet
- Add the World Community Grid logo hotlink
- Employees and members join the World Community Grid
- Your organization will be listed on Partner Web page with a link back to your external website.
Benefits
- Provide employees, members, and students with a free opportunity to make a difference on critical humanitarian issues.
- Augment organization’s community work at no additional cost.
- Strengthen your organization’s reputation by publicizing your overall contribution.
- Join forces with universities and other public and private organizations, working toward a common goal.
Security
- Agent software:
- Outgoing connections only so agent does not respond to external attacks
- Locally stored files and communications are encrypted
- Updates accepted from server only if authenticated via public-private keys
- Delayed communication retries to prevent contention during outages - Server site:
- Secure facility, biometric access control
- Multiple firewalls
- Votes on redundantly computed results to eliminate errant computations or tampering - Ongoing security audits:
- All software audited for vulnerabilities, viruses, and trojans
- Research software
- Physical server environment
- Ethical hacking tests
