Change the World With Your Computer - Important Projects Joins World Community Grid

Millions of personal computers sit idly on desks and in homes worldwide. During this idle time, 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, Important Projects has joined World Community Grid, and is encouraging its network of friends, colleagues and associates to contribute their idle PC time in support of the Human Proteome Folding Project.

World Community Grid establishes a permanent, flexible infrastructure that provides researchers with a readily available pool of computational power that can be used to solve problems plaguing humanity. And World Community Grid is safe and easy to use.

To join, go to www.worldcommunitygrid.org and simply download and install a free, small software program. When idle, your computers request data from World Community Grid's server. Your computers then perform computations using this data, send the results back to the server and prompt it for a new piece of work.

Important Projects is asking that people who join World Community Grid become members of Team Important Projects. As part of the team, members will earn points for Team Important Projects as well as for themselves. Important Projects will then publicize the points it earns as an association back out to its network.

World Community Grid will address global humanitarian issues, such as:

• New and existing infectious disease research: Researching cures for HIV and AIDS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), malaria and others.
• Genomic and disease research: The Human Proteome Folding project — World Community Grid's first project — seeks to help identify the functions of the proteins that are coded by human genes.
• Natural disasters and hunger: World Community Grid applications can help researchers and scientists with earthquake predictions, improving crop yields and evaluating the supply of critical natural resources like water.

What is grid technology?
Grid technology joins together many individual computers, creating a large system with massive computational power that exceeds the power of a few supercomputers. This capability can be applied, on a global scale, to very large and complex problems for the benefit of humanity.

And the benefits are proven. In 2003, IBM was one of the sponsors of a smallpox study that took advantage of grid computing. This study, using today's largest available super computers, would have taken years to complete. With grid computing, this study was completed in less than six months and identified 45 potential smallpox-treatment candidates.

Join World Community Grid as part of Team Important Projects today!