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BITC joins World Community Grid |
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| Business in the Community has now donated enough computing resource to the World Community Grid project to become an official partner. Out of business hours our servers used to be idle, now they are performing calculations to help fight AIDS, conquer cancer or grow nutritious rice. David Pemberton Director of Planning and Administrations, Business in the Community IBM, a member of Business in the Community, has created the World Community Grid which harnesses the spare computing capacity of 1.2 million computers in over 200 countries and makes it available - for free - to scientists engaged in not-for-profit, humanitarian research. To date the Grid has accelerated and made research affordable on a wide range of humanitarian projects. The World Community Grid has provided research scientists with over 230,000 years of computer run-time at no cost, and delivered over 250 million research results since 2004, often enabling research which would not otherwise be possible. For example, the ‘Fight AIDS’ project, one of the many running on World Community Grid, has identified over 40 potential drug candidates. It has achieved this in 6 months rather than 5 years using normal computing resources, and scientists are now proceeding with laboratory work to develop new drugs. Raising awareness and engagement World Community Grid helps raise public awareness of, and engagement in, the challenges facing society. Between 200 and 250 individuals join the Grid every day, thereby helping accelerate progress toward the Millennium Development Goals. Business in the Community took an innovative approach to contributing computing power to the Grid. David Pemberton, Director of Planning and Administrations said, "Like many organisations we try to keep the IT on people's desktops as simple and standard as possible. So rather than deploying the World Community Grid to make use of spare PC power, we have set it up so that it uses our servers. Out of business hours our servers used to be idle, now they are performing calculations to help fight AIDS, conquer cancer or grow nutritious rice." Business in the Community is the first of the World Community Grid's UK partners to work with IBM to bring the power of business servers to the Grid. It is keen to share its knowledge and encourages companies donate their unused out-of-hours computing resources. For more information contact David Pemberton david.pemberton@bitc.org.uk
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