::fibreculture:: Worldwide Community Grid

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

www.independent.co.uk/environment

. Solve the global water crisis from your laptop ..

 www.worldcommunitygrid.org

Friday, 10 September 2010

Help solve the global water crisis by leaving your laptop alone for a few 
hours and letting it join the millions of other computers on the 
Worldwide Community Grid.

This was one of the projects announced on September 7 by IBM which 
sponsors a global community of personal computers known as the Worldwide 
Community Grid

Scientists can tap into the idle processing power of computers on the 
grid and then use it to develop water filtering technology, research 
treatments for water-related diseases and clean up polluted water sources.

By using the processing power provided by the 1.5 million computers 
linked into the grid, scientists will be able to perform online 
environmental simulations, crunch numbers and pose hypothetical scenarios 
faster than before.

While networks of personal computers have previously been used for 
projects such as searching for extraterrestrial life, this is the first 
time a community of personal computers tackle our global environmental 
problems.

Scientists from the University of Virginia will use the Worldwide 
Community Grid to gain a better understanding of the effects of 
agricultural, commercial and industrial actions on Chesapeake Bay on the 
East Coast of the USA, and in Brazil scientists are using the grid to 
seek a cure to waterborne disease schistosomiasis.

In China researchers from Tsinghua University in cooperation with 
scientists in Australia and Switzerland are also using the grid to seek 
ways to purify contaminated water.

Computer users can become part of the global community by registering 
online at http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org and installing a free secure 
program which runs on Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS, when a user's 
computer is idle or between keystrokes the program requests data from the 
Worldwide Community Grid.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/solve-the-global-water-crisis-
from-your-laptop-2075548.html  (snip)

--

Cheers,
Stephen


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