What are the system requirements?

Dear World Community Grid users: We want to thank you all for contributing your computer's idle power to the Clean Energy Project! Our team here in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University is very excited about having the opportunity to closely work with you in finding new materials for alternative energy applications. We are jointly searching thousands of possible compounds as candidates for producing solar cells made of organic materials.

Most of the solar cells are made of highly structured semiconductor substrates. In contrast, our approach seeks to understand how photosynthetic organisms such as plants harvest sunlight using not-so-structured organic molecules. We plan to use the natural design principles of these organisms to create solar cells that behave similarly. Early stages of the project will help us understand many fundamental aspects of how to improve the performance of these organic-based materials. With your help, we will study how organic molecules stack to form thin films that can be used to develop flexible, lightweight solar cells, and possibly solar paint! Isn't that amazing? In later stages, we will study the electronic properties of these molecular compounds to better understand how the energy flows in these materials. One of our goals is to collaborate with experimental research groups that will synthesize the most promising chemical compounds; compounds that would be identified by using your donated computer time.

In this respect, your contribution is very important because you are helping us to dramatically accelerate the process of understanding the fundamental science behind these novel solar cells made of organic materials. Remember: the deployment of this technology has the potential to systematically lead the development of the next generation of solar cells. We will keep you posted as the project advances on our findings in this forum. You can also visit our website for more information: http://cleanenergy.harvard.edu.

Thank you again for donating your computer time for this project.

The Clean Energy Project team.

Today, I registered an account on WCG for the first time. I have watched the WCG website for a long time but did not find any projects there that interests me until now.

I was aware of The Clean Energy Project website and kept my eye on it for any new developments. So, to my surprise, this new project went online on WCG. That got my attention and eagerly signed up!

I was expecting this project to have its own URL just like the others. I did not expect it to appear on WCG. This is the only project I am crunching and will do so as long as it is up. I will not sign up for any of the current projects but am open to new projects in the future when they become available.

I look forward to being involved with this new project for a long time to come as well as being involved with this community forums.