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Samurai Scientific Joins World Community Grid

We have made it our mission statement to empower the transition from raw data to results.  We aim to do this through increasing the efficiency of data analysis and optimizing the power of modern computing, but sometimes that isn’t enough.  Sometimes you need sheer brute strength.

The untapped computing power of the world is immense – an estimated 650 million personal computers sit idly on desks and in homes worldwide.  The technology used to harness this unused power is Grid Computing.

Simply put, Grid Computing is a flexible network of computers sharing the workload of data analysis.  Solutions that in the past required super-computers or large amounts of processing time can now be solved using the massive parallel processing of Grid Computing.  Each computer in the grid performs a small chunk of the processing, using only as much resources as it has spare, but en-masse these small chunks can crunch numbers in impressively short amounts of time. 

In 2003, the IBM Corporation 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.  The current World Community Grid project is Human Proteome Folding and they are actively pursuing projects in the areas of Malaria, HIV, SARS and geological computations to help predict earthquakes, droughts and other natural disasters.

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.  To contribute to this growing movement, Samurai Scientific has become a partner of World Community Grid, joining the IBM Corporation and a group of leading foundations, public organizations and academic institutions.  Samurai Scientific is encouraging our employees, business associates, family and friends to contribute their idle PC time to World Community Grid at www.worldcommunitygrid.org.

Our Managing Director, Nick Bennett, MB/PhD, had already contributed over 100,000 “points” to the World Community Grid prior to this partnership.  “It was such a cool idea, to gather together all this unused power.  It just makes sense that Samurai should officially endorse this kind of effort,” he said after being notified of the partnership’s acceptance.  “We’re extremely proud of being an official part of this global collaboration.”

Employees, family, friends and business associates can contribute as part of the Samurai Scientific team.  Members will earn points for the company and as an individual.  Samurai Scientific will publicize the points it earns as a company both internally and externally.  The Samurai Scientific team can be found here. 

 How to Join

To join, employees, business associates, family and friends should go to www.worldcommunitygrid.org and simply download and install a free, small software program on their computers.  When idle, your computers request data from World Community Grid’s server.  Computers then perform computations using this data, send the results back to the server and prompt it for a new piece of work.

Importantly, World Community Grid is easy and safe to use.  No form of spyware, adware or other malicious code is included in the download.  Because the software uses only as much computational power as your machine has spare, it will not affect the normal operation of your computer.

Once the software is up and running, users can find and join the Samurai Scientific team through the links on the World Community Grid website, or by clicking on this link.

A World-Class Effort.

IBM’s world class and open eServer and Storage products, built with IBM’s innovative and open Middleware products like WebSphere, DB2 and managed by Tivoli, serves as the technology behind grid computing.  United Devices, the market leader in highly secure grid solutions for businesses of all sizes, developed the special software application that enables World Community Grid to operate.  Samurai Scientific, Marist College, Rochester Institute of Technology and other leaders in the worldwide community are partnering with World Community Grid and encouraging their employees, business associates, family and friends to participate.

"WORLD COMMUNITY GRID", the name and logo, are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the US, other countries, or both, and are used under license.