WCG - j2mail.de
Main menu:
WCG
November 2004 I.B.M. launched a project to harness untapped computing power from thousands of personal computers around the world to help the huge computational challenges in scientific research. The project, called the World Community Grid (WCG), was developed in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, the United Nations and other organizations, and represents a significant step in the use of Grid computing technology (today often referred as ‘cloud computing’).
Grid computing technology is useful for all kinds of scientific problems that require vast computing which can be broken up into small chunks for processing. Both biology and medicine are ideal areas given the increasing need of compute power in the search for genetic markers for disease and in seeking clues to the basic processes of life.
The World Community Grid is leveraging the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing platform, BOINC. The WCG is requiring the willingness by hundreds of thousands of volunteers to contribute the unused computing capacity of their personal computers. And in times of declining number of Desktop Computers where people are using increasingly smart devices with the compute power more than sufficient to perform complex calculations, it’s good to see support for Android in addition to the traditional Operating Systems like Microsoft Windows, Linux and Max OS X.
In beginning of 2016, the total supporting users in WCG are about half a million, where more than 10% are active contributors. The total number of active hosts is more than 208 Thousand, which result into an Average performance of about 492 TFLOPS (almost 0.5 10^15 Floating Point Operations per Second). The World’s fastest Super Computer is listed today with roughly 35 10^15 (Peta) FLOPS.
The currently active WCG research projects you can find here, and the completed ones you can find here.
If you consider joining the community, please click here and use this recruiting reference, thank you!