In November 2004, IBM launched World Community Grid with the goal of creating the world’s largest public computing grid to benefit humanity.
- 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?
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
