World Community Grid

Tantra Grand Rapids members, families, and friends are invited to join this important grid computing initiative to solve some of the world’s most pressing humanitarian issues including the fight against HIV/AIDS.

World Community Grid Launches Its RFP

In November 2004, World Community Grid released a Request For Proposal (RFP) which should be of interest to biomedical researchers, especially those involved in HIV/AIDS research. Researchers were invited to go to http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/files/rfp.pdf to download the RFP document and application form.

Every Tantra Grand Rapids Member Can Enlist

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 world’s estimated 650 million PCs could be linked to focus on humanity’s most pressing issues? What if every Tantra Grand Rapids member enlisted their laptops and desktops in research to focus on fighting diseases such as HIV/AIDS? What if every family member and friend also enlisted their laptops and desktops?

To make this vision a reality, the Tantra Grand Rapids has become a partner of World Community Grid, joining a group of leading associations, foundations, academic institutions and companies. Tantra Grand Rapids is encouraging its members to contribute their idle PC time to World Community Grid at www.worldcommunitygrid.org

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, members should go to www.worldcommunitygrid.org and simply download and install a free, small software program on their computers. When idle, your PC requests data from World Community Grid’s server. Your laptop or desktop then performs computations using this data, sends the results back to the server and prompts it for a new piece of work. It’s as simple as that!

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.

If you have further questions, you may contact Joe Starwood, an Tantra Grand Rapids member and long-time World Community Grid participant.