The World Community Grid: Donate your spare PC Power

How many times do you think you utilize the power of that Pentium 4/Athlon chip you have in your PC completely? Not even a fraction of the time the computer is on. While writing a letter, surfing the web… all that time, much of the computing power goes to waste.

SETI was one of the earlier concepts, which let a software use the free computing power to look for extra terrestrial life. And now in collaboration with IBM, top scientific research organizations are joining forces in an effort to utilize the unused power of millions of computers worldwide and help solve complex medical/global problems.

The effort is called The World Community Grid and would be used for selected medical and environmental research programs. For a user to contribute, one has to visit the website, download a small program, join as a user, and let the software download some raw data to process. The application would process that data when the PC is idle and on completing processing, it would upload it to the servers and download some more raw data.

The organizers are optimistic with this project and claims that it can find cure for AIDS and HIV, Alzheimer’s or cancer, improve forecasting of natural disasters and aid studies to protect the world’s food and water supply. I have joined as a user (Team: Opera User) and now it is your turn!