Fast Company Magazine has a great article on IBM’s World Community Grid. It is projects like it and a similar one from UC Berkeley that inspired us to start CPUsage.

IBM’s grid is a network of hundreds of thousands of personal computers that spend their spare time processing data for projects relating to cancer research, world hunger or even climate change. Computer owners volunteer their computers for the cause and in return they feel good about how they are helping.

So why not take this model but use it for commercial purposes? Industries far and wide have large, time consuming processing jobs that are done every day. Cancer researchers don’t want to wait 2 years to get their research back, so they use IBM’s World Community Grid. Semiconductor designers don’t want to wait too long to get their work back either, so why can’t they use the grid?

Give the article from Fast Company a read and picture the technology being used to solve problems around semiconductor design, computer generated imagery, weather forecasting or even stock trading. That is what we are doing here at CPUsage.

From FastCompany.com:

Most of us use our computers about as efficiently as we use our brains: We scratch the surface, never tapping the full potential. WCG exploits this unused computing power by borrowing — with the owner’s permission — a machine’s central processing unit to do some serious math. It works unobtrusively, when you aren’t working. You download software that takes advantage of any break, from a phone call to a pause while you’re thinking of what to type next. The instant your fingers touch the keys, the calculations cease.

At IBM, a full-time staff of seven — dispersed across the country, from Beaverton, Oregon, to Austin — makes sure that the projects’ individual applications are running smoothly, that the grid is assigning work and returning results to the appropriate lab, that problems aren’t cropping up in the online member forums, and that software for upcoming projects is being vetted.

Using this powerful new tool, AIDS researchers at Scripps Research Institute are generating new drug leads to combat the growing strains of drug-resistant HIV. French scientists are learning more about the proteins behind muscular dystrophy. (Partly because of that project, the lead researcher, Alessandra Carbone, was recently named the “Woman Scientist of the Year” by the French government.) Scientists at the University of Washington are compiling a comprehensive map of rice proteins, which could help developing countries grow more nutritious, higher-yield crops. A team led by the Cancer Institute of New Jersey used the grid to develop algorithms that identify subtle signatures in digitized cancer tissues that could lead to early, accurate, and rapid detection; the results convinced the National Institutes of Health to award the team $2.5 million to expand the database.

Read the full story by clicking here.