Use Old Computers To Contribute To Society With World Community Grid from IBM
33World Community Grid (WCG) is an effort to create the world's largest public computing grid to tackle scientific research projects that benefit humanity.[4] Launched on November 16, 2004, it is co-ordinated by IBM with client software currently available for Windows, Linux, macOS, and Android operating systems.[5][6][7]
Using the idle time of computers around the world, World Community Grid's research projects have analyzed aspects of the human genome, HIV, dengue, muscular dystrophy, cancer, influenza, Ebola, Zika virus, virtual screening, rice crop yields, clean energy and COVID-19.[8]
The Research Projects have yielded numerous scientific papers. For example, in 2019 and with the help of WCG, the OpenZika project scientists published a paper on the discovery of a compound (FAM 3) that inhibits the NS3 Helicase protein of the Zika virus, thus reducing viral replication by up to 86%.[9][10]
As of March 2020, the organization has partnered with 452 other companies and organizations to assist in its work, has over 40,000 active registered users, and a combined total run time of over 2 million years.[11]
History
In 2003, IBM and other research participants sponsored the Smallpox Research Grid Project to accelerate the discovery of a cure for smallpox.[13] The smallpox study used a massive distributed computing grid to analyze compounds' effectiveness against smallpox.[14] The project allowed scientists to screen 35 million potential drug molecules against several smallpox proteins to identify good candidates for developing into smallpox treatments. In the first 72 hours, 100,000 results were returned. By the end of the project, 44 strong treatment candidates had been identified.[15] Based on the success of the Smallpox study, IBM announced the creation of World Community Grid on November 16, 2004, with the goal of creating a technical environment where other humanitarian research could be processed.[1][14]
World Community Grid initially only supported Windows, using the proprietary Grid MP software from United Devices which powered the grid.org distributed computing projects. Demand for Linux support led to the addition in November 2005 of open source Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) grid technology which powers projects such as SETI@home and Climateprediction,[16] and Mac OS X and Linux support was added since the introduction of BOINC.[5] In 2007, the World Community Grid migrated from Grid MP to BOINC for all of its supported platforms.[17]
Scale of the project
As of May 1 of 2019, World Community Grid had over 42,000 active user accounts, with over 147,000 active devices.[3] Over the course of the project, more than 2,000,000 cumulative years of computing time have been donated, and over 5.3 billion workunits have been completed.[11]
Operation
The World Community Grid client software works in the background, showing itself as a small icon in the computer's system tray. When the BOINC client is used, as in this example, the icon is a small "B."
The client software's status window, displaying information about the work currently being done in the background. This particular computer is 60.3% complete with its current workunit. When it reaches 100%, it will start on a new workunit and the results of the previous workunit will be transmitted back to WCG.
The World Community Grid software uses the idle time of Internet-connected computers to perform research calculations.[18] Users install WCG client software onto their computers. This software works in the background, using spare system resources to process work for WCG.[18][19] When a piece of work or workunit is completed, the client software sends it back to WCG over the Internet and downloads a new workunit.[4][20] To ensure accuracy, the WCG servers send out multiple copies of each workunit.[21] Then, when the results are received, they are collected and validated against each other.[22][23]
While many public computing grids such as SETI@home and Folding@home are devoted to a single project, World Community Grid offers multiple humanitarian projects under a single umbrella. Users are included in a subset of projects by default, but may opt out of projects as they choose.[24]
When World Community Grid launched, they used the proprietary Grid MP client from United Devices. After adding support for the open source BOINC client in 2005, World Community Grid eventually discontinued the Grid MP client and consolidated on the BOINC platform in 2008.[25]
Even though WCG makes use of open source client software, the actual applications that perform the scientific calculations may not be. However, several of the science applications are available under a free license, although the source is not available directly from WCG.[26]