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Now, you can contribute to humanitarian causes while you are at lunch or dinner, chatting with your friends or are busy with something that is not concerned with working on your computer, by donating your computers idle time to various community grids.

Community grids believe in the concept of collaborative computing by providing a grid technology to establish a permanent and flexible infrastructure that provides researchers with a readily available pool of computational power that can be used to solve problems plaguing humanity. According to an estimate, there are more than 650 mn PCs in use around the world and almost each one of them has the potential to be a part of the community grid. The computational power of these millions of individual computers, if combined together, can give the processing power far in excess of that of the worlds largest supercomputers.

There are several public research grids working in this area. Some of the community grids that are using this concept of collaborative computing are SETI@home, Folding@home, Geo-Grid, BeinGRID, AFRICA@home, among others. Most of these grid projects have been established for a single research project or single type of research projects. But, some community grids support multiple projects simultaneously. One such is the World Community Grid (WCG).

What is WCG?
The WCG is a mission to create the largest public computing grid for the benefit of humanity. It works on the belief that if technological innovations are combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism, it can change the world for the better.

Only the WCG runs multiple research projects simultaneously. For example, SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI); the goal of Folding@home is to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases; Geo Grid aims at contributing to the solving of global social problems such as environment conservation, resource exploration, natural disaster prevention, and risk management; AFRICA@home is a website for volunteer computing projects to contribute to African humanitarian causes; and BEinGRID is a business experiments grid. The WCG, on the other hand, has already completed five projects like Help Defeat Cancer, Genome Comparison Project, Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy, and the first phase of Human Proteome Folding Project.

Till now, there were only two active projects on the WCG: The second phase of Human Proteome Folding Project and FightAIDS@home, but now a new research effort has been launched by IBM, the University of Texas Medical Branch and the University of Chicago to search for drugs that may one day cure or treat dengue fever, West Nile encephalitis and a host of related diseases, including Yellow Fever and Hepatitis C.

For these projects, the basic requirement to volunteer your computer is an Internet connection. Daniel Dias, director, IBM India Research Laboratory, says, "Anyone with a computer and Internet access can be a part of the solution to address this very critical health concern. By donating our unused computer cycle time, we can all have a profound effect on how quickly this team can move to the next phase of drug discovery. For example, if one lakh volunteers sign up within the first week for this project, it could reduce the time required to complete calculations by 50%." Users can install the WCG client software onto their computers. This program works in the background, using the idle time or the spare system resources.

The Initiators
In 2003, IBM and other research participants sponsored a project to accelerate the discovery of a cure for smallpox. The smallpox study used a massive distributed computing grid to analyze the effect of 35 mn potential drug molecules against several smallpox proteins to identify the most suitable drug molecule for developing into smallpox treatments. In the first 72 hours, 1 lakh results were returned. By the end of the project, forty-four strong drug molecules had been identified. Based on the success of the smallpox study, IBM announced on November 16, 2004 the creation of World Community Grid with the goal of creating a technical environment where other humanitarian research could be processed.

Since its launch, more than 750,000 devices have been registered. The computer power that the volunteer community has donated equals one PC running non-stop for more than 115,000 years. At present, volunteers are donating 1,100 years of compute time per week.

IBM is coordinating and managing the World Community Grid and has donated hardware, software, technical services and expertise to build the infrastructure for the WCG. IBM is also providing free hosting, maintenance, and support services to the WCG. Fourteen IBM servers serve as "command central" for the WCG.

The Platform
Initially, the client software was available for Windows only, but now it is also available for Linux, Mac-OS-X and FreeBSD operating systems including Windows by the use of the open source BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) client that is available for all supported platforms. The WCG also differs from other grid projects by offering support for more than one grid infrastructure.

Although the WCG makes use of an open source client software, the actual applications that perform the scientific calculations use closed source, keeping in mind the security threat to the results obtained by the calculations.

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