Wondering if anyone has heard of this before? Basically just a massive public computing network using idle processor cycles to assist with research. It was developed by IBM.
From Wikipedia:
World Community Grid (WCG) is an effort to create the world's largest public computing grid to tackle scientific research projects that benefit humanity. Launched on November 16, 2004, it is co-ordinated by IBM with client software currently available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Android operating systems.
Using the idle time of computers around the world, World Community Grid's research projects have analyzed aspects of the human genome, HIV, dengue, muscular dystrophy, cancer, influenza, Ebola, virtual screening, rice crop yields, and clean energy. As of October 2014, the organization has partnered with 466 other companies and organizations to assist in its work, and has over 65,000 active registered users.
Interesting stats:
Scale of the project
As of October 2014, World Community Grid had over 65,000 active user accounts, with over 249,000 active devices. Over the course of the project, more than 1,000,000 cumulative years of computing time have been donated, and over 2 billion workunits have been completed.
And some results:
Scientific Results
Since its launch, several projects have run in the World Community Grid. Some of the most exciting results include:In February 2014 the Help Fight Childhood Cancer project scientists announced the discovery of 7 compounds that destroy neuroblastoma cancer cells without any apparent side effects. This discovery, made with the support of the WCG volunteers, is a positive step towards a new treatment. The project has announced that it is seeking a collaboration with a pharmaceutical company in order to develop the compounds into treatments. Given the success of the project, the scientists have stated that are already planning a follow-up project that will focus in other pediatric cancer, possibly in collaboration with a newly formed Pan-Asian oncology group, of which they are a founding member.
The GO Fight Against Malaria project reported the discovery of several molecules that are effective against Malaria and Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis (including TDR-TB, for which there is no treatment available). The project also tested for new molecules against MRSA, Filariasis and Bubonic Plague. Laboratory testing continues in order to turn those molecules into possible treatments. GFAM was also the first project to ever perform a billion different docking calculations.
The Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together project scientists reported the discovery of several new Dengue protease inhibitors, most of which also inhibit the West Nile Virus protease. A handful of these have already entered "crucial pre-clinical pharmacokinetic and efficacy studies". In November 2014, an update reported that the scientists have a drug lead that disables a key enzyme that allows the Dengue virus to replicate. It has also shown the same behaviour in other flaviviruses, such as the West Nile Virus. No negative side effects such as toxicity, carcenogenicity or mutagenicity have been observed, making this drug lead a very strong antiviral drug candidate for these viruses. The scientists are now working to synthesize variants of the molecule to improve its activity and enter planned pre-clinical and clinical trials.
The Clean Energy Project has published a database of over 2.3 million organic molecules which have had their properties characterized. Of these, 35,000 molecules have shown the potential to double the efficiency over organic solar cells being produced nowadays. Before this initiative, scientists knew of just a handful of carbon-based materials that were able to convert sunlight into electricity efficiently.
The FightAIDS@Home project scientists announced that they found two compounds that make a completely new class of AIDS-fighting drugs possible: "two compounds that act on novel binding sites for an enzyme used by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the virus that causes AIDS. The discovery lays the foundation for the development of a new class of anti-HIV drugs to enhance existing therapies, treat drug-resistant strains of the disease, and slow the evolution of drug resistance in the virus".
It is all on a donation basis, there is nothing to be made from it, apart from the good feeling that maybe, one day, you could be helping someone somewhere with your idle capacity. Kind of like a superhero saving the world in their sleep.
I run it on my dedicated media server in Germany (Hetzner) and it doesn't affect watching the content anymore than the distance already does, so it's happy to reduce it's use when you need to use the device, or can be set to stop completely when not in an idle state. It also runs on a 3 year VPS I paid $60 for, because I have no used for it, bloody impulse buying!
If anyone is interested, you can join here. (Chucked my recruit ID in there, curious to see if anyone does join.)
I've also just created an OzBargain "team", so if anyone wants to join that too, feel free, just search for it.
Some of those things above are a bit 'over-simply' worded… for example you can't 'discover several molecules that are effective against Malaria and Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis' etc. simply by harnessing donated computer idling time. You can run a lot of simulations, and come up with a huge number of putative/hypothetical molecules, which may or may not be stable/able to actually be created/ effective etc., but you then of course have to go on and do the real resource/expense-intensive research in a lab/ in the field/ in vivo/ etc. The same applies to "the discovery of 7 compounds that destroy neuroblastoma cancer cells without any apparent side effects." That is just not something you could do with computer idling time; you could achieve the very first "shot-gun simulation" part of it that way, but in the grand scheme of things that is actually a pretty insignificant part of the research re the actual resources required to do it. They could have done it with a way smaller number of dedicated high-powered computers, in a really short time.
Of course, I'm not "bagging" the initiative, I think it's great!
I'm just saying that some of the wording above implies that these things were only made possible by such an initiative. That is simply not the case.
Incidentally, about a decade or so ago something LIKE this was popular with nerds/geeks of all ages; it involved a massive global collective of peeps outsourcing their putes to scan the 'white noise' beyond Erth's atmosphere in (almost) real-time, searching for signs of contrivance (i.e. some sort of ordered signal, i.e. evidence of aliens). I think that one was linked to a certain screen-saver/ became active whenever the screen-saver turned itself on. I wonder if that one's still around…