|
Change
the World . . . with Your Computer
United
Way of Tarrant County Joins World Community Grid
Millions of personal computers sit idly
on desks and in homes worldwide. During this idle time, the
mysteries of science and space continue to elude us. What if
each of the millions of PCs in the world could be linked
to focus on humanity’s most pressing issues?
To make this
vision a reality, United Way of Tarrant County has become a
partner of World Community Grid, joining the IBM Corporation
and a group of leading foundations, public organizations and
academic institutions. World Community Grid establishes a
permanent, flexible infrastructure that provides researchers
with a readily available pool of computational power that can
be used to solve problems plaguing humanity. Importantly,
World Community Grid is easy and safe to use.
To join,
employees, members, family and friends should go to
www.worldcommunitygrid.org and simply download and install
a free, small software program on their computers. When idle,
your computers request data from World Community Grid’s
server. Computers then perform computations using this data,
send the results back to the server and prompt it for a new
piece of work.
World Community Grid provides an
efficient and effective way to make a difference on problems
that plague humanity. We are asking our employees, members,
family and friends to join World Community Grid
as part of our overall efforts to enrich the lives of
United Way of Tarrant County
employees, members,
their families, and our communities. In addition, we would
like for everyone to become a member of the
United Way of Tarrant County
team.
World
Community Grid will address global humanitarian issues, such
as:
-
New
and existing infectious disease research: Researching
cures for HIV and AIDS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS),
malaria and others.
-
Genomic and disease research: The Human Proteome
Folding project—World Community Grid’s first project—seeks
to help identify the functions of the proteins that are
coded by human genes.
-
Natural
disasters and hunger: World Community Grid applications
can help researchers and scientists with earthquake
predictions, improving crop yields and evaluating the supply
of critical natural resources like water.
What is
grid technology?
Grid
technology joins together many individual computers, creating
a large system with massive computational power that exceeds
the power of a few supercomputers. This capability can be
applied, on a global scale, to very large and complex problems
for the benefit of humanity.
The benefits
are proven. In 2003, the IBM Corporation was one of the
sponsors of a smallpox study that took advantage of grid
computing. This study, using today’s largest available super
computers, would have taken years to complete. With grid
computing, this study was completed in less than six months
and identified 45 potential smallpox-treatment candidates.
IBM’s world
class and open eServer and Storage products, built with IBM’s
innovative and open Middleware products like WebSphere, DB2
and managed by Tivoli, serves as the technology behind grid
computing. United Devices, the market leader in highly secure
grid solutions for businesses of all sizes, developed the
special software application that enables World Community Grid
to operate.
United Way
of Tarrant County, Marist College, Rochester Institute of
Technology and other leaders in the world community are
partnering with World Community Grid to help solve problems
that are plaguing humanity.
Join the
United Way of Tarrant County World Community Grid Team today!
| 
