z2000, That sounds like Lawyer speak!

"We’re pleased to announce a new academic research grant program: Google Exacycle for Visiting Faculty. Through this program, we’ll award up to 10 qualified researchers with at least 100 million core-hours each, for a total of 1 billion core-hours. The program is focused on large-scale, CPU-bound batch computations in research areas such as biomedicine, energy, finance, entertainment, and agriculture, amongst others. For example, projects developing large-scale genomic search and alignment, massively scaled Monte Carlo simulations, and sky survey image analysis could be an ideal fit".

Lets hope they lean a bit heavier on the BioMed, Energy and Agro than Finance and Entertainment.

So, it means that Google effort is around 12,8 % less than WCG community could provide to researchers.

Anyway, if WCG structure could capture something from Google efforts, will be a good improvement here !

For sure, you probably are right. It appear not have the same characteristics that we can see in WCG.

Take a look at this part of Google announcement:

"Preference will be given to projects that are fairly high-risk/high-reward with the potential to drastically transform the scientific landscape. Even projects that yield negative results can still provide public data that the community can continue to analyze. At completion of the project, we recommend, but do not require, that all the researcher's data be made freely available to the academic community."

How much is one billion core hours?

Yesterday, WCG completed 329 years of cpu time, which works out to about 3 million hours. So at the current rate, WCG members would donate 1 billion hours in approximately one year.