By webmaster Wednesday June 10th 2009 21:00 Central European Time

“Switch off your computer when you are not using it,” is one of those classical everyday green living advices you can read on environmental pages throughout. If your are like me, you will know that up against this idea there are plenty of reasons to keep your computer running when you are not using it, reasons of which running the virus scan while you are asleep is only one. For those of you who still worry that this behavior is wasteful, there is something else you can do to ease you conscience.

The World Community Grid is a system where you can let them borrow some of your processing power to do calculations for research projects for the benefit of man kind. They seem to have a major focus on medical research, like cures for cancer and AIDS, but they also got a green tech project running now called “The clean energy project”. The way it works is that you download and install a small program onto your computer. When idle, your computer will request data on a specific project from World Community Grid’s server. It will then perform computations on this data, send the results back to the server, and ask the server for a new piece of work.

As you probably remember from school, you can solve one equation with one unknown or two equations with two unknown. And that is where most people stopped. You can actually extend the principles to solve n equations with n unknown, where n can be a very, very large number. It just takes a lot of time and is prone to errors. So, it is beyond the capability of any human to get it right and produce a result in a reasonable time once the size of the problem grows. In fact it is often beyond the capability of a single computer too. Now its getting interesting. Many problems can be broken down into parts, and one computer can calculate one part and another computer can calculate another part of the problem, and then we can merge the partial solutions together. And this is really how the World Community Grid works. It is called parallel computing. The supercomputers of this world work in a similar fashion. There you have a grid of processors working in parallel on parts of the same problem. It’s nothing that says that all the processors have to be inside the same box. They could just as well be spread over a large geographical area, like the entire globe. Which is exactly what they are in the World Community Grid.

It is open to public and non-profit organizations to submit proposals for new projects in the World Community Grid. That means that we, the Green Life Innovators community, being a non-profit organization focusing on one of the areas that they support, will have the opportunity to propose new projects to The World Community Grid. I don’t believe they will grant us the use of the grid for every proposal we could make, though. Our members should, however, keep this in mind, that we do have this opportunity to submit a proposal to tap into this vast processing power if we come up with projects that need a lot of calculations and the people behind the World Community Grid find them worth doing.

Links

World Community Grid
The ongoing “Clean energy project”

Disclaimer

The sites mentioned in the website review category are sites ran by people that do things we find worth mentioning. That their sites are mentioned here, does not imply that the people behind these sites are associated with Green Life Innovators in any way. And it especially does not imply that they publish their information “the open source way”.

Further reading:

• Website review: Open courseware, bringing higher learning to everyone
• Are solar cells the solution to the energy crisis?
• GLI-member portrait : David Williams, Canada
• GLI Philippines Tour 2009, Sept 13th-October 2nd
• Travel report, Philippines September 2009

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