Change the World . . . with Your Computer

Hope House Day Care 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 worlds’ estimated 650 million PCs could be linked to focus on humanity’s most pressing issues?

To make this vision a reality, Hope House Day Care, 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, business associates, 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. (Click here to see minimum requirements.)

World Community Grid provides an efficient and effective way to make a difference on problems that plague humanity.  We are asking our employees, business associates, family and friends to join World Community Grid as part of our overall efforts to enrich the lives of humanity around the world.  In addition, we would like for everyone to become a member of the Hope House 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. 

Hope House Day Care, Rochester Institute of Technology, Information Technology Association of Canada and other leaders in the world community are partnering with World Community Grid to help solve problems that are plaguing humanity.

Join the Hope House World Community Grid Team today!