Change the World . . . with Your Computer

Georgetown University's Advanced Research Computing (ARC) Joins 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 world’s estimated 650 million PCs could be linked to focus on humanity’s most pressing issues?

To make this vision a reality, Georgetown University's Advanced Research Computing (ARC) has become a partner of World Community Grid, joining the IBM Corporation and a group of more than 100 companies, associations, foundations and academic institutions. Georgetown University is encouraging its students and staff to contribute their idle PC time to World Community Grid at www.worldcommunitygrid.org.

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 our Georgetown ARC team, you can register at 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. Our ARC team is at www.worldcommunitygrid.org/team/viewTeamInfo.do?teamId=F34NW54MTP1.

“World Community Grid provides our researchers with an efficient and effective way to make a difference on problems that plague humanity,” said Steve Moore, ARC Program Director. “We are asking selected researchers at this time to consider joining World Community Grid as part of our overall efforts to enrich the lives of our communities and to engage useful, emerging technologies.”

Over the last year, World Community Grid ran the Human Proteome Folding Project, which has been providing 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.

Please contact Arnie Miles at adm35 at georgetown.edu for additional information on how to become a member of World Community Grid 's Georgetown University team.

ARC Home | CCF Boilerplate for Grants & Contracts

© 2006, Georgetown University