World Community Grid
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 worlds' estimated 650 million PCs could be linked to focus on humanity's most pressing issues?
To make this vision a reality, Coastal has become a partner of World Community Grid, joining the IBM Corporation and a group of leading foundations, public organizations and academic institutions. World Community Grid establishes a permanent, flexible infrastructure that provides researchers with a readily available pool of computational power that can be used to solve problems plaguing humanity. Importantly, World Community Grid is easy and safe to use.
We encourage our employees, members, family and friends to join the World Community Grid as part of our overall efforts to enrich the lives of our communities. From your home computer, visit www.worldcommunitygrid.org and simply download and install a free, small software program. After registering, please join the Coastal Credit Union Team, so that our results are reported collectively.
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 will address global humanitarian issues, such as:
- New and existing infectious disease research: Researching cures for HIV and AIDS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), malaria and others.
- Genomic and disease research: The Human Proteome Folding projec-World Community Grid's first project-seeks to help identify the functions of the proteins that are coded by human genes.
- Natural disasters and hunger: World Community Grid applications can help researchers and scientists with earthquake predictions, improving crop yields and evaluating the supply of critical natural resources like water.
What is grid technology?
Grid technology joins together many individual computers, creating a large system with massive computational power that exceeds the power of a few supercomputers. This capability can be applied, on a global scale, to very large and complex problems for the benefit of humanity.
The benefits are proven. In 2003, the IBM Corporation was one of the sponsors of a smallpox study that took advantage of grid computing. This study, using today's largest available super computers, would have taken years to complete. With grid computing, this study was completed in less than six months and identified 45 potential smallpox-treatment candidates.
IBM's world class and open eServer and Storage products, built with IBM's innovative and open Middleware products like WebSphere, DB2 and managed by Tivoli, serves as the technology behind grid computing. United Devices, the market leader in highly secure grid solutions for businesses of all sizes, developed the special software application that enables World Community Grid to operate.
Coastal, the North Carolina Technology Association, IBM and other leaders in the world community are partnering with World Community Grid to help solve problems that are plaguing humanity.
