Would you like to help Scientists Fight COVID-19 with your Smartphones and Computers, from the Comfort of Your Home? Well, volunteers are joining IBM’s World Community Grid, a free,volunteer-driven resource to help scientists; the program crowdsources the unused power of volunteers’ computers to perform virtual experiments.
Ms. Juan Hindo is the Corporate Social Responsibility Manager, for IBM
The coronavirus pandemic has reminded us all about the power and importance of helping each other. For many people, there seems to be little that they can do to help scientists find medical treatments for coronavirus, or they might be unsure how to get involved in the fight against COVID-19.
Well, that’s just changed. Volunteers are now banding together to help scientists seek drug candidates that might help treat COVID-19. The World Community Grid is a project hosted by IBM, where anyone with internet access can now help scientists from the comfort of their own home–no medical degree, time, or money, required.
How does the World Community Grid work? World Community Grid is a free, volunteer-driven resource that crowdsources the surplus power of volunteers’ otherwise idle computers, using it to perform virtual experiments. Volunteers download a free and safe app that automatically performs virtual scientific experiments on their computers. When volunteers’ devices are otherwise idle, the app crunches numbers for scientists, who are eager for every bit of processing power to run their simulations. Volunteers anywhere in the world can participate by downloading the app onto their desktop, laptop, or Android smartphone. It uses the IBM cloud to automatically distribute and collect the computational assignments on volunteers’ computers.
The more citizens who volunteer to download the app, the more computer simulations performed, and the more compounds that can be screened in less time. To date, through the WorldCommunity Grid, more than 770,000 people and 450 organizations have contributed the equivalent of nearly two-million years of computing power to support 30 research projects, including studies on cancer, Ebola, Zika, influenza, muscular dystrophy, malaria, and AIDS, as well as projects for developing better water filtration systems and solar energy collection.
Results from World Community Grid projects are shared with the world, and so far more than 50 peer-reviewed scientific articles have been published. Scientists at Japan’s Chiba Cancer Center Research Institute and Chiba University used the World Community Grid to identify seven promising drug candidates to treat neuroblastoma, one of the most common and dangerous forms of childhood cancer.
The World Community Grid projection coronavirus, called”Open Pandemics-COVID19,” was devised by Scripps Research, the largest private, non-profit biomedical research organization in the United States. The project can pivot to screen compounds for future pandemics.
For more information please visit: WorldCommunityGrid.org
