World Community Grid
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| Developer(s) | IBM |
|---|---|
| Initial release | November 16, 2004 |
| Stable release | 7.6.22 |
| Development status | Active |
| Operating system | Microsoft Windows, Linux, Android, macOS |
| Platform | BOINC |
| Type | Volunteer computing |
| Average performance | 1.1 PFLOPS |
| Active users | 58,982 (April 2017) |
| Total users | 523,476 |
| Active hosts | 213,914 |
| Total hosts | 3,435,607 |
| Website | worldcommunitygrid.org |
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, macOS, 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 April 2017, the organization has partnered with 466 other companies and organizations to assist in its work, has over 58,000 active registered users, and a combined total run time of over 1.4 million years.
In 2003, IBM and other research participants sponsored the Smallpox Research Grid Project to accelerate the discovery of a cure for smallpox. The smallpox study used a massive distributed computing grid to analyze compounds' effectiveness against smallpox. The project allowed scientists to screen 35 million potential drug molecules against several smallpox proteins to identify good candidates for developing into smallpox treatments. In the first 72 hours, 100,000 results were returned. By the end of the project, 44 strong treatment candidates had been identified. Based on the success of the Smallpox study, IBM announced on the creation of World Community Grid on November 16, 2004, with the goal of creating a technical environment where other humanitarian research could be processed.
World Community Grid initially only supported Windows, using the proprietary Grid MP software from United Devices which powered the grid.org distributed computing projects. Demand for Linux support led to the addition in November 2005 of open source Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) grid technology which powers projects such as SETI@home and Climateprediction, and Mac OS X and Linux support was added since the introduction of BOINC. In 2007, the World Community Grid migrated from Grid MP to BOINC for all of its supported platforms.
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