Change the World . . . with Your Computer: North County Health Services Joins World Community Grid
Millions of personal computers sit idly on desks and in homes worldwide. As they wait, every hour hundreds of people contract and die from infectious diseases. While computer owners run their screen savers, millions die from hunger, or environmental disasters devastate whole communities. 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, North County Health Services has become a partner of World Community Grid, joining the IBM Corporation and a group of more than 325 companies, associations, foundations, nonprofits and academic institutions. North County Health Services is encouraging members of the community to contribute their idle PC time to assist humanitarian research by joining World Community Grid at www.worldcommunitygrid.org and then becoming a member of their team, NC Health.
World Community Grid uses grid technology to establish a permanent, flexible infrastructure that provides researchers with a readily available pool of computational power that can be used to solve problems plaguing humanity. Grid technology joins together many individual computers, creating a large system with massive computational power that far exceeds the power of a few supercomputers. Importantly, World Community Grid is easy and safe to use.
To join, individuals should go to www.worldcommunitygrid.org and simply download and install a free, small software program on their computers. When idle, your computers request data from World Community Grid’s server. Computers then perform computations using this data, send the results back to the server and prompt it for a new piece of work.
“World Community Grid provides our busy members of the community with an efficient and effective way to make a difference on problems that plague humanity,” said Marci Miller, IS Director, North County Health Services. “We are asking individuals to join World Community Grid as part of our overall efforts to enrich the lives of our communities.”
Today, hundreds of thousand of volunteers around the globe are donating some of the time when their computers are on but not in use, and World Community Grid is harnessing this power to help advance promising humanitarian research projects. Results on critical health issues have already been achieved, demonstrating World Community Grid’s potential to make significant inroads on a great range of future projects that can benefit the world. (Please click here to see World Community Grid’s research projects.)
Join World Community Grid as part of the North County Health Services team today!