What if each of the world’s billion PCs could be linked to focus on humanity’s most pressing issues? World Community Grid — launched in November 2004, and dedicated to becoming the world’s largest public computing grid working on humanitarian research — is making this a reality.
This initiative allows hundreds of thousands of volunteers to donate unused computing power to researchers around the world. Progress on critical health issues, such as HIV/AIDS has already been achieved.

Grid computing joins together many individual computers, creating a large system with massive computational power that far surpasses the power of several supercomputers. Because the work is split into small pieces that can be processed simultaneously, research time is reduced from years to months, or even days. The technology is also very cost-effective, enabling better use of critical funds.
Smaller examples of grid technology for humanitarian projects have been utilized in the past. However, most of them required the scientific community to solicit volunteers and establish a new grid infrastructure before running each project.
World Community Grid, in contrast, establishes a permanent, flexible infrastructure that gives researchers a much larger — and continuous — pool of available resources

Besides individuals who contribute the unused cycle time of their computers, other leaders in the corporate, not-forprofit and academic communities are teaming with World Community Grid and encouraging their employees, members, students and faculty to participate.