MEED CENTER Joins World Community Grid
Change the World . . . with Your Computer
Millions of personal computers sit idly on desks and in homes worldwide.
During this idle time, the mysteries of science and space continue to
elude us. What if each of the world’s estimated 650 million PCs could be
linked to focus on humanity’s most pressing issues?
To make this vision a reality, MEED CENTER has become a
partner of World Community Grid, joining the IBM Corporation
and a group of more than 165 companies, associations, foundations
and academic institutions. MEED CENTER is encouraging its staff
and business associates to contribute their idle PC time to assist
humanitarian research by joining World Community Grid at
www.worldcommunitygrid.org and then becoming a member of the
MEED CENTER / GDAACC team.
World Community Grid uses grid technology to establish a permanent,
flexible infrastructure that provides researchers with a readily available
pool of computational power that can be used to solve problems plaguing
humanity. Grid technology joins together many individual computers, creating
a large system with massive computational power that far exceeds the power
of a few supercomputers. Importantly, World Community Grid is easy and safe
to use.
To join, staff and business associates should go to
www.worldcommunitygrid.org
and simply download and install a free, small software program on their computers.
When idle, your computers request data from World Community Grid’s server.
Computers then perform computations using this data, send the results back to
the server and prompt it for a new piece of work.
“World Community Grid provides our busy staff with an efficient and effective
way to make a difference on problems that plague humanity,” said Galileo Jumao-as,
Director of Minority Business Development. “We are asking our staff to join World
Community Grid as part of our overall efforts to enrich the lives of our communities.”
In its first year, World Community Grid ran the Human Proteome Folding Project,
which provided scientists with data on how individual proteins within the human
body affect human health, enabling them to develop new cures for diseases like
Lyme disease, malaria and tuberculosis. Scientists now have descriptions of 120,000
protein domains that are critical to human well-being; without the benefit of this
free grid technology, it would have taken 5 years to get these results, compared
with just 12 months on World Community Grid.
On November 21, World Community Grid launched FightAIDS@Home. FightAIDS@Home, which
is 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.
Possible future projects will address global humanitarian issues, such as new and
existing infectious disease research; genomic and disease research; and natural
disasters and hunger.
Join World Community Grid as part of the MEED CENTER team today!
