The MEED Center

Millions of personal computers sit idly in offices and homes worldwide. What if each of the world’s estimated 650 million PCs could be linked to focus on humanity’s most pressing issues? To make this vision a reality, MEED Center joined IBM Corporation and a group of more than 165 foundations, companies and academic institutions to become a World Community Grid (WCG) partner.

In the first 12 months of our involvement, the MEED Center contributed 40 days of Run Time. Currently, the WCG is running four projects: Nutritious Rice for the World, Discovering Dengue Drugs, Help Conquer Cancer, Human Proteome Folding and FightAIDS@Home. The results of the most recently completed project, AfricanClimate@Home is available at www.worldcommunitygrid.org on the research link. The migration from UD (United Devices) to BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure Networking Computing) was completed. The web site was translated into Chinese, and a number of other interesting features were added.

The WCG uses grid technology to establish an infrastructure that provides researchers with a pool of  computational power. When idle, computers request data from WCG’s server, perform computations using this data, send the results back to the server and prompt it for a new piece of work. More importantly, WCG is easy and safe for researchers to use and for members to contribute into.

We invite you to join us in this international effort. Go to www.worldcommunitygrid.org to download and install a free software program on your computers. It's that simple.