IBM, along with representatives of the world's leading science, education and
philanthropic organizations, today launched World Community Grid, a global humanitarian
effort that applies the unused computing power of individual and business computers
to help address the world's most difficult health and societal problems.
World Community Grid will harness the vast and unused computational power of the
world's computers and direct it at research designed to help unlock genetic codes
that underlie diseases like AIDS and HIV, Alzheimer's and cancer, improve forecasting
of natural disasters and support studies that can protect the world's food and
water supply. Anyone can volunteer to donate the idle and unused time on a computer
by downloading World Community Grid's free software and registering at
www.worldcommunitygrid.org
"World Community Grid represents a new model for philanthropic giving,"
said Linda Sanford, IBM senior vice president, Enterprise On Demand Transformation,
and chairperson of World Community Grid's Advisory Board. "IBM is involved
in World Community Grid because just as we do for clients, we're committed to
bringing the best technologies forward to address critical societal and health
issues. World Community Grid demonstrates that government, business, and society
can be the direct beneficiary of innovation if we are willing to rethink the way
innovation and science both develop and prosper."
The first project of World Community Grid, the Human Proteome Folding Project,
is sponsored by the Institute for Systems Biology, an internationally known non-profit
research institute dedicated to the study and application of systems biology.
The Human Proteome Folding Project hopes to identify the proteins that make up
the Human Proteome and, in doing so, better understand the causes and potential
cures for diseases like malaria and tuberculosis.
Further projects are to be selected by a newly created World Community Grid Advisory
Board that will evaluate proposals from leading research, public and not-for-profit
organizations seeking to conduct humanitarian research using grid computing technology.
The Board is expected to oversee five to six projects a year.
"World Community Grid will enable researchers around the globe to gather
and analyze unprecedented quantities of data to help address important global
issues, including public health issues," said Elaine Gallin, Ph.D., an Advisory
Board Member for the initiative and the Program Director for Medical Research
at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. "I am very pleased to serve as an
advisor for this project, which promises to harness grid computer technology to
address complex clinical research questions and will inspire us to look beyond
the technological limitations that have historically restricted us from addressing
some of our most intractable problems."
The advisory board of World Community Grid includes members of some of the world's
most prestigious scientific, research and charitable organizations, including
the National Institutes of Health, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Markle
Foundation, the Mayo Clinic, Oxford University, the World Health Organization
and the United Nations Development Programme.
IBM has donated the hardware, software, technical services and expertise to build
the infrastructure for World Community Grid and provides hosting, maintenance
and support.
In addition, IBM is joined in the project by United Devices, a leader in grid
solutions, which plans to aggregate the idle power of participating PCs and laptops
into its existing worldwide grid. IBM and United Devices previously worked together
to create the Smallpox Research Grid, which created a grid of more than two million
volunteers from 226 countries to speed the analysis of some 35 million drug molecules
in the search for a treatment for Smallpox. Results were delivered to the U.S.
Department of Defense for further study late last year.
By some estimates, there are more than 650 million PCs in use around the world,
each a potential participant in World Community Grid. Grid computing is a rapidly
emerging technology that can bring together the collective power of thousands
or millions of individual computers to create a giant "virtual" system
with massive computational strength. Grid technology provides processing power
far in excess of the world's largest supercomputers.
World Community Grid is built from computing time donated by thousands of IBM
employees, as well as scores of PCs and laptops from computer users around the
world. World Community Grid is powered by IBM technology, which includes IBM eServer®
p630 and x345 systems and IBM's Shark Enterprise Storage Server® running IBM
DB2® Universal Database software and the AIX® and Linux operating systems.
IBM DB2 software can support millions of SQL queries a day as it manages the data
provided by potentially millions of computers working in concert.
About IBM
IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80 years of
leadership in helping businesses innovate. For more information about Grid computing
at IBM, visit www.ibm.com/grid. For more information on IBM's philanthropic
endeavors, visit
www.ibm.com/ibm/ibmgives.
