ACADEMIA

Millions of personal computers sit idle on desks and in homes worldwide. During this idle time, answers to the mysteries of science and space continue to elude us. What if each of the world's estimated 650 million PCs could be linked to focus on humanity's most pressing issues? To make this vision a reality, York University has become the first Canadian University to partner with World Community Grid -- joining the IBM Corporation and a group of more than 220 companies, associations, foundations, nonprofits and academic institutions. York University is encouraging its students, alumni, faculty and staff to contribute their idle PC time to assist humanitarian research by joining World Community Grid at www.worldcommunitygrid.org and by becoming a member of the York University Research team. World Community Grid uses grid technology to establish a permanent, flexible infrastructure which provides researchers with a readily available pool of computational power that can be used to solve problems plaguing humanity. Grid technology joins together many individual computers, creating a large system with massive computational power that far exceeds the power of a few supercomputers. And World Community Grid is easy and safe to use. "It's amazing the difference we can make as individuals by simply joining World Community Grid and pooling our collective resources," said Stan Shapson, York's vice-president of research and innovation. "With a community of researchers, staff, students and alumni as large as we have, and as a university dedicated to contributing to global research opportunities, York University will be able to make a significant and measurable addition toward this effort." "We are thrilled that York University has become IBM's largest World Community Grid partner in Canada," said Garth Issett, IBM vice-president of manufacturing, development and operations. "IBM's relationship with York has evolved on many positive fronts over the past few years. We hope that other Canadian universities and public organizations will follow York's lead and also sign up for the World Community Grid program." In a few short weeks, the York University Research team on World Community Grid has attracted nearly 150 users, placing it near the top 100 of more than 14,000 teams worldwide on the Grid. The York team has accounted for more than 2,000 results returned to the grid to date, which has translated into almost two full years of accumulated research on various projects. "World Community Grid is a tangible way for York to enhance its growing research reputation within the regional community," said Shapson. "It complements our external collaborations with leading industry partners like IBM and our involvement in partnerships such as YORKbiotech, the National Centre for Medical Device Development, and CONCERT." To join, individuals should visit www.worldcommunitygrid.org to download and install a free software program onto their computers. When idle, a member's computer requests data from World Community Grid's server. The computer then performs computations using this data, sends the results back to the server, and prompts it for a new piece of work.