HEALTH

Clemson University is tops in helping to tackle climate change, muscular dystrophy, cancer and a host of other world problems by contributing idle computer time to the World Community Grid (WCG) that lets researchers around the world work on life’s toughest issues. Clemson students work on lab computers that contribute computing power to the World Community Grid.The Clemson team takes the unused power of the Windows computers in instructional labs and gives it to the World Community Grid humanitarian projects where there are a wide variety of computational science problems to solve. The grid is run by IBM. According to IBM, Clemson’s School of Computing has been contributing more than four years of CPU time per day. This means that approximately 1,500 Clemson computers have been working on World Community Grid problems every day. Depending on the day, Clemson has at times been first in the nation and as high as fourth in the world for contributions among World Community Grid teams. “Most computers at universities are under-utilized. For instance, at night when everyone sleeps, the computers are idle,” said assistant professor in the School of Computing Sebastien Goasguen, who heads up the team of students, professors and Clemson Computing and Information Technology staff. “By joining WCG, we maximize our utilization by virtually donating computers when we don’t use them. In doing so, we contribute to humanitarian causes.” Close to 400,000 teams around the world participate in donating time. According to Goasguen, Clemson is consistently ranked among the top 10 universities in the United States for computing power contributed. “Clemson could be higher ranked if more folks joined the Clemson School of Computing team on WCG,” said Goasguen. “We’re a couple of clicks away from being the top team in the world. It’s doable.” World Community Grid's mission is to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. Its not-for-profit work is built on the belief that technological innovation combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism can change the world for the better. Grid computing joins together individual computers, creating a large system with massive computational power that surpasses the power of a handful of supercomputers. Because the work is split into small pieces that can be processed simultaneously, research time is reduced from years to months and is more cost-effective. To check out Clemson’s stats or to join the team, go to the World Community Grid Web site.