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 November 16, 2004, it is funded and operated by IBM with client software currently available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and FreeBSD 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, rice crop yields, and clean energy. The organization has so far partnered with over 400 other companies and organizations to assist in its work, and has over 600,000 registered users as of September 2012.
Read more about World Community Grid: History, How It Works, Statistics and Competition, Outreach, Active Projects, Inactive Projects
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or community:
“The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.”
—Primo Levi (1919–1987)
“He thought that, because the community represents millions of people, therefore it must be millions of times more important than the individual, forgetting that the community is an abstraction from the many, and is not the many themselves.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)