Turning Screensavers into Life Savers

Posted October 4, 2007

The SAS community keeps its computer network humming 24/7 with everything from completing history assignments to sharing music files during school dances. However, even on our electronically active campus, there is excess computing capacity. Enter World Community Grid. World Community Grid harnesses the power of excess personal computing capacity around the world and uses it to help researchers who are working on humanity's most pressing issues.

SAS recently joined more than 360 companies, associations, foundations, nonprofits and academic institutions as a member of the World Community Grid. World Community Grid uses grid technology to join together many individual computers, establishing a permanent, flexible infrastructure that provides researchers with a readily available pool of computational power that far exceeds the power of a few supercomputers. Importantly, World Community Grid is easy and safe to use. There is no impact whatsoever to vulnerability to viruses by participating with the grid project and your computer’s participation in the grid stops when you hit a key or move your mouse so that your productivity is not affected.

SAS would like to encourage you to contribute your idle PC time to assist humanitarian research by joining World Community Grid. To join, go to http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org and download and install a free, small software program on your computers. You can choose to join as an individual, to establish a new team, or to become a member of the St. Andrew’s-Sewanee team. When idle, your computer will 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.

""Through World Community Grid, SAS computers that were sitting idle overnight or running screen savers during classes are now being used to help to create accurate climate models for areas of Africa, to identify drugs that combat dengue, hepatitis C, West Nile, and Yellow fever viruses and HIV, and are helping scientists better understand protein structures,” according to Bob Hoagland, Director of Technology at SAS. "We welcome members of our extended community of alumni, parents and friends to join our World Community Grid team."

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