World Community Grid

[Allanon]

Hi all,

I'm currently involved in a little side project whose aim is to promote the use of a little piece of software called World Community Grid.

World Community Grid is a global public computer grid that aims to significantly speed the rate of research into many different beneficial projects, such as curing cancer, muscular dystrophy and developing cheap, nutritious rice for the world. A computer grid is where many different computers, from many different locations, all partake in a common task, each doing their own bit to contribute. The way this works in World Community Grid, is each computer in the Grid is given a work item, which is some arbitrary calculation. Once this computation has been completed, the result is returned to a central point where all the results are collected and analysed, and this analysis is passed to the research teams.

What we are trying to do, is get people to become part of this grid and contribute their computer's processing time to the research. This works by installing a tool which runs in the background and begins processing when your computer is idle. It is highly configurable - you can change how much of your processor is used, after how many minutes of idleness it should start its work etc. I barely notice it on my PC and there's been no slowdown. The only thing you'll notice is a very cool screensaver which shows a sciency graphical representation of the calculations it's doing ^.^.

In order to get started, all you need to do is sign up and download the tool. Signing up gives you your own profile and allows you to choose which research projects you devote your idle processor time to and also shows you how many points you've racked up etc.

Below is the link to sign up to WGC and the team that I'm currently in. Let's see if we can get enough members to topple some of the big names in the list

World Community Grid - Register

Here is a link to find out a little more about World Community Grid: World Community Grid - About Us

I think it's a hugely beneficial little tool and makes great use of the time where your PC would otherwise be sat idle.

If anyone would like more info, feel free to reply here or PM me.

Thanks guys .

Thanks for letting me post this Det.

Sounds great. I'll have a read of that

[Allanon]

Originally Posted by Sash

Sounds great. I'll have a read of that

Excellent, Excellent ^.^