RATHER than spend their time looking for aliens, the hundreds of millions of PCs idling away in homes and offices could soon be helping to find treatments for HIV and cancer, understand climate change and even prevent famine.
SETI@Home, which sifts through radio signals for any signs of alien intelligence, is the most famous project to tap into PCs鈥� down time. Now, the World Community Grid (WCG), launched last week in New York, will be the first public computing network dedicated to humanitarian projects. The organisation wants to recruit 10 million PCs to analyse massive medical, environmental and social data sets, which would take expensive supercomputers years to process.
鈥淢illions of PCs could do work that would take years on expensive supercomputers鈥�
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Last year, for instance, a grid of 2 million PCs uncovered 44 likely smallpox drugs from 35 million candidate molecules. The normally year-long task was completed in three months.
The WCG is run by IBM 鈥� a name that will hopefully convince large corporations to jump on board, says Paul Jeffreys of the University of Oxford, who is on the WCG鈥檚 advisory board. 鈥淭his could really become the largest computing resource in the world,鈥� he says.
