TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

World Community Grid: Brother, Can You Spare Some CPU Time?

Joe Maglitta | Date: 07-30-09 | Comments

WCG painlessly harnesses unused PC power to research the toughest global problems.

My local Whole Foods store makes it easy to donate $1, $2 or $5 for meals for elders, needy kids, HIV patients and other worthy causes. Just tear off a paper slip at the checkout register and�bam!�instant charity. It�s easy to do the same next door at the PetSmart to help feed shelter animals.

Though I usually give a couple of bucks, I have mixed feelings about this kind of painless, point-of-sale charity. Is it too easy? Too reflexive? Cheap balm for otherwise chintzy behavior? (My state, Massachusetts, perennially ranks in the lowest 20 percent for per capita charitable giving as a percentage of income.) After all, a meaningful contribution to the greater good has got to hurt a little�cost you something�right?

Good AND Painless

I have no such ambivalence about the World Community Grid (WCG). That�s the 4-year-old organization that aggregates idle CPU time to create a massive grid computer supporting research on pressing global problems. Projects launched in the last year include The Clean Energy Project, Help Fight Childhood Cancer, Influenza Antiviral Drug Search and Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy - Phase 2.

I�ve been an admirer of WCG since I hosted a summit event on grid computing three years ago featuring Prof. Arthur Olson of the Scripps Research Institute�s Department of Molecular Biology. Olson described how WCG made possible critical computational research to design new anti-HIV drugs. Without the grid, he estimates the complex research would have taken five years, instead of six months.

Such supercharging caught the attention of judges for the Coffey International Award, which last month awarded its annual prize for contributions advancing United Nations Millennium Development Goals to WCG�s creator, IBM. (Note: IBM sponsors Smarter Technology, but has no control over editorial content and did not suggest this topic. I would have written about WCG regardless of its originator.)

WCG gives qualified researchers a permanent, flexible infrastructure and a large, continuously available pool of resources. It runs on open-source software called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) developed at the University of California/Berkeley, with funding from the National Science Foundation.

130 Years Versus One Day

At present, WCG encompasses roughly 1.3 million PCs belonging to 460,000 volunteers from more than 200 countries plus 409 partners�businesses, associations, foundations, government agencies and universities that helped develop and operate WCG.

Results are impressive. �World Community Grid made it pos�sible for us to analyze in one day the number of specimens that would take approximately 130 years to complete using a traditional computer,� says Dr. David J. Foran, professor and lead researcher at The Cancer Institute of New Jersey, UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.

�What this means is that the power of grid technology enabled us to analyze hundreds of arrays of cancer tissue statistical data that allow multiple experiments to be conducted simulta�neously and more rapidly.�

Grid It Your Way

To join the grid, PC users download a simple program from the WCG site. Participants control several factors, including whether the program runs as a screensaver or an application, how much resources are used, when computation and communication can be done, whether connections should be made automatically, which proxies and firewall settings to use, and more.

Aware of security and privacy concerns, WCG has created a straightforward privacy policy. An excerpt:

"World Community Grid assures Members that applications will not damage their systems or invade their privacy in any way. Our agent runs unobtrusively in the computing background and is not invasive. It cannot detect or change any other files or material on Members machines. It can only update project-specific data in its own files."

The only detail I found lacking had to do with information gathering (emphasis mine):

"In order to run our projects, World Community Grid software automatically detects certain basic information from a Member's machine; this includes info about the Member's processor speed, and set preferences regarding disk space, memory and times to run the projects on the machine. Members will have access to the information about the properties that are measured by the World Community Grid Software and for what purpose this information will be used."

I�d want a bit more info about that last bit. Otherwise, I checked around the Net for issues and problems and other concerns, but found none. WCG seems to do what it tries to do: harness unused CPUs for global good.
Part of the Problem or Solution?

Most of us have tons of unused PC power, at work or home. If you do a Web search on �idle PC time� you�ll turn up dubious sounding sites like http://moneytrafficmachine.com that promise to turn unused CPU time into cash. (Is it just me, or does this sound like a thinly disguised way to become a spammer?) If you or your organization is interested in painlessly helping the good guys, check out WCG at http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/.