The World Community Grid is a project run by the philanthropic arm of IBM and utilises the BOINC platform developed at the University of California, Berkeley to help with research from mapping cancer markers to identifying candidate drugs to fight AIDS.
It uses the spare computing power of its members to create a high-performance distributed computing platform, which organisations can use to tackle problems usually reserved for some of the world’s fastest supercomputers.
Tom Bennett, front end developer at MobasIgnite, explains: "What makes it oddly compelling, other than helping our fellow man, is that you can form teams and ‘compete’ against one another on a global scale.
"For each work unit you complete, the calculations are verified by comparing to the results of others on the same work unit – and you are assigned ‘credits’ in return.
"We’ve taken great pride in seeing our rank rise steadily to where we now sit: 14th in the UK in terms of credits generated per day, only five places behind Wales and several places above Anglia Ruskin University and Oxford University.
"What we’d like to see is a push across Cambridge - as a leading city for technology-based companies - to compete with one another in putting our spare computing power to good use. Please join us in signing up to the World Community Grid initiative."
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