Pure Digital Thought

The World Community Grid is a life sciences distributed computing project sponsored by IBM. The project works by having people volunteer unused CPU time to find cures for human diseases. Currently, they are searching for drugs to treat AIDS, testing models for automating the early detection of Cancer cells, working on protein folding predictions to help understand the causes of diseases like Alzheimer’s, Cancer, Cystic Fibrosis, etc, and also working on a protein matching process to help future disease research.

It’s easy to get started with helping out. There are two ways you can join. The easiest is to join and download the WCG client software that will run on your system. This client will automatically download WCG “workunits” that are small pieces of work needed to be done to solve the problem. The second way is to get the BOINC client which is a generic client that is able to work with any of the 37 distributed computing projects out there on the web. When you install this client, you can follow the simple directions on how to make the BOINC client work with World Community Grid.

Once you have one of these clients setup, your computer will download workunits and start crunching numbers. For each workunit your computer turns in, you get a score that accumulates and gives you a world ranking. You can even join teams of users to combine scores and get a higher ranking and compete with other teams. In the end, the friendly competition helps to get a lot of work done and will one day help find cures for diseases.

Cautious computer users might wonder how safe is it to download a program when they aren’t sure *exactly* what that program is doing. The good thing about World Community Grid is that it is backed by IBM and trusted research groups so you know that someone isn’t trying to run something bad on your computer. What they say is being run is exactly what your computer is running. Also, users might be concerned with something like this slowing down their computer, after all, it is using your CPU. Well, the good news is that the software runs in low priority mode. This means that if your computer is doing any other work, like a word processor or surfing the internet, then World Community Grid slows down and moves out of your way. Therefore, you shouldn’t notice any difference because it only takes time on your CPU when you aren’t using it like when you are reading a web page and aren’t actively clicking a link or when you aren’t even at your computer.

So, give it a try. Go out, get involved, and help the world find cures for AIDS, Cancer, and other human diseases.