The World Community Grid is a non-profit philanthropic project founded by IBM in 2004 to create a voluntary public grid of computers to run public-benefit projects for public and non-profit organizations. The crucial point is this – we promise to donate our computer time to run the project for free. In return, the non-profit organization that signs the Letter of Agreement with the World Community Grid promises that: “Results must be made available to the global research community by the sponsoring research organization and remain in the public domain.” This is a binding legal contract which defines the results created by our computers as “public domain”. They are freely available to the world. No one retains any rights to them.

You can find the full description at http://worldcommunitygrid.org/about_us/request_for_proposals.html . Just click on the RFP Download Link and you will download the Request for Proposal in PDF format, which you can view with Acrobat Reader. It explains the criteria used by the Advisory Board (described at http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread_thread,27722) to select projects. The Advisory Board considers new project applications 4 times a year.

In 2003 IBM helped sponsor a Smallpox Research Project run on a computing grid at http://www.grid.org as explained at http://worldcommunitygrid.org/projects_showcase/projects_archive.html . Several research partners including The University of Oxford, the University of Western Ontario, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Research Center, Essex University, Evotec OAI, Accelrys, IBM, and the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases participated in this project. The focus was to study drugs which might be used against smallpox. The results were so good that IBM decided to fund a permanent World Community Grid, to run philanthropic public-benefit programs.

The very first project is the current Human Proteome Folding Project which the World Community Grid is running in conjunction with http://www.grid.org for the Institute for Systems Biology. This project is described at http://worldcommunitygrid.org/projects_showcase/human_proteome.html and http://www.systemsbiology.net/Default.aspx?pagename=humanproteome . The Human Genome Project has mapped the genes describing the long string of amino acids from which human proteins are built. The Human Proteome Folding Project is attempting to compute how these strings fold up to form human protein molecules so that molecular biologists around the world can use this information for medical research.

This is an example of the type of project that the World Community Grid is intended to run. The project requires millions of computer hours to finish. Just maintaining a system with enough processors to run such a project would cost an organization millions of dollars a year. But if enough people are willing to contribute their unused computer time for public benefit, the World Community Grid can apply this computer processing power to solve important problems.

This is why I am volunteering my time as well as my computer.

Lawrence
The World Community Grid is a Non-Profit Philanthropic Project