Category Announcements
Bookmark :              


I know Dec blogged about this awhile back, but I thought I would bring it up as well. There is a humanitarian effort underway sponsored by IBM known as the World Community Grid (WCG, so I don't have to type it over and over ;) ). The WCG was announced around November 2004 as a grid computing effort, sponsored by IBM, whose goal is to help the world's scientists and researchers tackle problems such as AIDS, Alzheimers, etc. by providing free access to a massive grid computer. Similar to SETI@home, the WCG is designed to tap into the world's dormat computing power by utilizing all of those unused cycles of processing power to help tackle these problems. From the announcement in Computerworld last november:

IBM said the World Community Grid project calls on home and corporate PC users to install a 1.5MB software program that allows their unused computer cycles to work on critical scientific research. ...

The new grid will be used for medical research to help unlock genetic codes that could help find cures for AIDS/HIV, Alzheimer's disease and cancer, according to the group. It will also be used to conduct research to improve the forecasting of natural disasters and find new ways to protect the world's food and water supplies.

The first project to be tackled is the Human Proteome Folding Project, which aims to identify the proteins that make up the Human Proteome, which could help lead to cures for diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis. The proteome project is sponsored by the Seattle-based Institute for Systems Biology, a nonprofit research institute dedicated to the study and application of systems biology.

I know there is a Lotus Domino Bloggers team, as well as a plethora of other teams. If you can spare the computing cycles, this is a great humanitarian effort.

Rock
**We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. - Carl Sagan