‘World Community Grid’ launched: donate computer time for global humanitarian effort

"IBM, along with representatives of the world's leading science, education and philanthropic organizations, has recently launched the ‘World Community Grid’, a global humanitarian effort to apply the unused computing power of individual and business computers to help address the world's most difficult health and societal problems.

The World Community Grid intends to harness the vast and unused computational power of the world’s computers - by some estimates there are more than 650 million PCs in use around the world, each a potential participant - and direct it at research designed to help unlock genetic codes that underlie diseases like AIDS and HIV, Alzheimer’s and cancer, improve forecasting of natural disasters and support studies that can protect the world’s food and water supply. Anyone can volunteer to donate the idle and unused time on a computer by downloading World Community Grid’s free software and registering at www.worldcommunitygrid.org

The first project of World Community Grid, the Human Proteome Folding Project, is sponsored by the Institute for Systems Biology, a non-profit research institute dedicated to the study and application of systems biology."

Basically, they are looking at how many of the known proteins might work in the human body with an eye to finding cures for diseases. I posted a message about this in November when it was launched, but it was right before the big website transition and it got a bit lost.

I joined in January (after I moved house) and have had no problems at all. I mainly use my computer for wordprocessing and spreadsheets and my computer has no trouble folding proteins while I do that. We do, however, have to turn the grid off when my husband runs his much bigger technical programs. You should have antivirus software and a firewall for doing this, but you should have these anyway. I installed the software and found it really quite easy.

We are about a third of the way through all the proteins that need folding, which means at the current rate we'll be done early next year. The more people who join, the faster it will get done. Unfortunately, the rate of new members joining seems to have slowed down recently.

Of course, anything that is developed as a result of the science will take a long time to reach the market, but it is a relatively easy way of helping medical research that might ultimately benefit cancer patients. After all, HER2 is an oncoprotein, and maybe there are ones scientists don't know about.

I like it because it makes me feel like I'm doing something about cancer every day.