-
Did you find this post helpful?
Yes |
No
World Community Grid
There have been several posts in the last few weeks regarding medical issues. For those interested in medical research the World Community Grid is an American based organisation
co-ordinated by IBM for the purpose of speeding up medical research using spare CPU capacity on personal and business computers worldwide. Work units are downloaded via
the internet to a volunteers computer, processed automatically and on completion sent back via the internet to the Grid and then onto the facility researching the disease.
To ensure the integrity of the results multiple copies of each work unit are distributed, processed by computer simulation and the results are used only when verified.
In addition to medical research several other humanitarian projects such as Clean Energy are subject to this kind of research.
Just as most members here post under a pseudonym the same applies for volunteers on the Grid who can sign up individually or as part of a team and can also choose
which disease or humanitarian project they wish to contribute to. The process is secure, works with most operating systems and the Grid does provide technical support.
A volunteers computer can be set to run silently in the background without impacting on other functions and to date more than 1,000,000 years of computing time has been donated
and over 2 billion work units have been processed worldwide. All results and volunteers contributions are publicly available.
The commonalities between Blackjack and the World Community Grid are computer simulation and teamwork. For those forum members who are interested and with spare computer
capacity you can read more at www.worldcommunitygrid.org. and Wikipedia. Thanks to Norm for permitting this post.
Last edited by davethebuilder; 03-13-2017 at 05:47 AM.
Casino Enemy No.1
-
Did you find this post helpful?
Yes |
No
Update -
Following IBM’s decision earlier this year to cease administering the World Community Grid please note that it is now being managed by the Krembil Research Institute in Toronto, Canada. Krembil is part of the University Health Network, a large public teaching hospital and research organisation. The data migration project took place over a three month shutdown earlier this year and is now complete. IBM, with over 450,000 computers, still remains the main contributor to this initiative.
Unfortunately, Krembil, as a scientific research organisation, was not fully prepared or resourced to manage a worldwide grid computing project of this size, mainly due to lack of server capacity and technical support, but has since sourced external help and sponsorship and the program is once again running smoothly. As a result there was some loss of volunteers so for those members who did sign up and may have experienced problems please note that the system is now functional. The system still utilises BOINC and work units are now processed on both CPU’s and GPU’s.
Post transition and looking to the future, Krembil plans to take on more medical and humanitarian projects which will initially involve North American high schools in order to introduce students to science and technology as well as high performance computing and also to utilise their resources for the benefit of humanity.
Last edited by davethebuilder; 07-30-2023 at 06:31 AM.
Casino Enemy No.1
Posting Permissions
- You may not post new threads
- You may not post replies
- You may not post attachments
- You may not edit your posts
-
Forum Rules
Bookmarks