Tech giant IBM has highlighted the impact that its World Community Grid is playing in advancing humanitarian research.
Tlale Mtshontshi, IBM corporate citizenship and affairs manager, says: “The grid is about large scale volunteerism - utilising an individual's unused computer capacity to address scientific problems - and in doing so, accelerates research breakthroughs.”
The World Community Grid is a system of linked personal computers from volunteers who donate spare processing power for humanitarian projects.
The World Community Grid, founded and sponsored by IBM, provides researchers around the world with the equivalent of millions of dollars of free computational power to enable medical, nutrition, energy and environmental research.
In a statement, IBM says the World Community Grid is the world's largest public humanitarian grid, equivalent to one of the world's most powerful supercomputers in strength.
The organisation explains that increased data, interconnected networks and embedded intelligence can be used to improve healthcare such as research into HIV/Aids.
It works by aggregating the unused cycle time of 1.5 million personal computers donated by hundreds of thousands of volunteers in more than 80 countries, including SA.
African Climate, with the University of Cape Town, is using the World Community Grid to improve climate modelling designed to help African farmers with crops.
This year the World Community Grid provided the equivalent of about 400 teraflops of speed, or 400 trillion floating-point operations per second.
In total, 14 projects contributing to five of the eight UN Millennium Development Goals are currently running or have completed their computational phase, involving teams of scientists from 35 research centres in six countries.
IBM claims its investment in the World Community Grid has provided research scientists with over 252 000 years of computer run-time at no cost, and delivered over 290 million research results since 2004.
More than 400 organisations are official partners of the World Community Grid, such as Unicef, United Way and Aids Action Committee.
To find out more, or to volunteer your computer, click here.
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