Science Fair Project Encyclopedia
World Community Grid
The World Community Grid is an effort to create the world's largest public computing grid to tackle projects that benefit humanity. It is primarily run by IBM and currently available only for the Windows operating system, although there is a Linux port in development.
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How it works
The World Community Grid software pools the spare resources of Internet-connected home computers together and applies this computing power toward the advancement of humanity. Previous public computing grids such as SETI@home or Genome@home have been targeted towards a single project. The Community Grid will eventually support many different humanitarian projects.
Within the grid, users may join teams, allowing for a heightened sense of community identity.
History
Announced November 16, 2004 by IBM, the World Community Grid uses the same technology from United Devices Inc. which powers the United Devices Cancer Research Project and the other grid.org projects. The initial project is the Human Proteome Folding Project, which is also run simultaneously as a grid.org project. However, IBM has stated that all future projects will be exclusive to the World Community Grid.
Slashdot
On December 30, 2004, as the grid approached 50,000 machines, the cooperative weblog Slashdot ran a blurb containing a clever reference to the Slashdot Users team on the grid. Within hours, the team had grown from a modest 79 members to almost 3,000. Before this, the largest team was one set up by IBM, with a quite respectable membership of around 370 members.
Projects
The only project to date is the Human Proteome Folding Project, which aims to predict the structure of human proteins. Devised by Richard Bonneau at the Institute for Systems Biology, the project will use the grid to produce the likely structures for each of the proteins. From these predictions, researchers hope to predict the function of the myriad proteins. This increased understanding of the human proteins should prove vital in the search for cures to human diseases.
See also
External links
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