Winona State University Participates in the
World Community Grid
Winona State University is proud to announce our participation in the World Community Grid. The World Community Grid is sponsored by IBM and their ultimate goal is “to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity." Currently, the WCG is doing this by conducting valuable biological research.
What is it?
The World Community Grid is an organization that works with a large group of partners all over the world. These partners lend computer processing time within their institutions to the WCG organization’s projects. The processing time lent does not interfere with productivity or cost the partners any resources. Only when the computers are idle is their processing power tapped.
WSU participates by allocating 70 of our most powerful desktops as active participants in the grid. These computers are located in the Information Gallery in the Darrell W Kruger library. These PCs are on 24/7, therefore considerable processing power is being contributed to the global effort.
How does it Work?
Each of the Information Gallery computers has installed on it a small program. The following is from the WCG website and explains how the program works.
“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. Each computation that your computer performs provides scientists with critical information that accelerates the pace of research!”
What problem are they working on?
From the WCG website – The researchers use this distributed computing to “contribute your computer's idle resources to calculate the sequence similarity level among the whole protein content encoded in completely sequenced genomes of hundreds of organisms, including humans and several other species of medical, commercial, industry, or research importance. The calculated similarity indices will be used, together with standardized Gene Ontology, as a reference repository for the annotator community, providing an invaluable data source for biologists.”
Additional computer lab resources will be identified in the future for participation in this program.
For more information, please visit the World Community Grid website.
Last Modified: Wednesday, September 05, 2007 14:56 by Charmaine Gorak
