The Krembil Research Institute assumed management of the World Community Grid in September 2021 and is asking members of the Krembil community to donate their idle computing power to this exciting research platform.
The World Community Grid is a global computing initiative that connects thousands of devices and uses them to run complex calculations in parallel, forming a distributed supercomputer that scientists can use to advance their research projects.
To contribute to this initiative, simply download and install the BIONIC app on your desktop or mobile devices and choose the projects you want to support. Upon selecting projects, the app will run computations in the background on your device—without slowing down your device’s performance or draining its battery.
The process is safe and secure, and you can choose what projects to run and when, and how much computing power to share. Contributing to the World Community Grid will not waste your mobile data, because the BIONIC app only downloads jobs and uploads results while your device is connected to Wi-Fi.
Many of the research projects conducted at Krembil require considerable computational power. "With support from our funding partners and volunteers around the world, people will be able to participate in Krembil-led research, in collaboration with Canada's New Digital Research Infrastructure Organization, Compute Ontario and SHARCNET, bringing the community together to raise awareness for the various diseases that we study,” says Krembil Senior Scientist, Dr. Igor Jurisica, who oversaw the transfer of the World Community Grid from IBM to Krembil.
IBM launched the World Community Grid in 2004 to enable the public to support scientific research by donating their unused computing power to computationally intensive data processing. This initiative has enabled the public to participate in numerous health-related research projects. For example, the Scripps Institute recently used the World Community Grid to identify potential drugs to treat COVID-19. This project highlights the incredible power of distributed computing—a year's worth of calculations were completed in just 10 days.
To learn more about how you can contribute to the Word Community Grid, click here.