The paragraph below is taken from The World Community Grid website and explains their work much better than I could
“World Community Grid enables anyone with a computer, smartphone or tablet to donate their unused computing power to advance cutting-edge scientific research on topics related to health, poverty and sustainability. Through the contributions of over 650,000 individuals and 460 organizations, World Community Grid has supported 22 research projects to date, including searches for more effective treatments for cancer, HIV/AIDS and neglected tropical diseases. Other projects are looking for low-cost water filtration systems and new materials for capturing solar energy efficiently.”
I have been contributing to this project since October 2012. You don’t need to do anything other than download the software and choose the specific piece of research you want your computer to work on. As your computer contributes its power you get awarded virtual badges in recognition of your contributions. So how does it work? Well it downloads a unit of work automatically, processes it over a couple of hours and then uploads the results, before downloading the next piece of work.
I don’t even notice the software running in the background and it has no impact on me using my computer at all, though you can further tweak the settings to decide when you want to let it run and even specify special applications that when running will prevent the spare CPU power from being used.
I have connected my World Community Grid account to my Twitter account so I can see on a regular basis exactly what my computer has contributed. Below are a couple of examples from my twitter feed today:
I donated 13 days of cpu time to WCG during the past week
I earned 2419677 points (#45933) and 4632 results (#23390) by donating over 1 year (#67699) of cpu time to WCG
It’s completely free to sign up to and become a member of and without any extra effort you’re contributing to some vital work.
Note that the World Community Grid is actually a Coporate Citizenship project by IBM that uses the Berkley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) client to manage the work units, and is one of many science projects that you can subscribe to via the BOINC software. Others include the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and the factorisation of large integers , so there’s probably something for everyone!
Available BOINC projects are here: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php
BOINC software is available for download from here: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php