By Tom Bennett, Front End Developer in Mobas’ website design team
A couple of weeks ago Steven Knibbs, Mobas’ Lead Developer, sent an internal email to all of us at Mobas asking us if we could sign up with World Community Grid and use our spare computing power to help make the world a better place – from mapping cancer markers to identifying candidate drugs to fight AIDS.
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. It uses the spare computing power of its members to create a high-performance distributed computing platform which organisations can use to create distributed clusters which can be used to tackle computational problems usually reserved for some of the world’s fastest supercomputers.
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 5 places behind Wales and several places above Anglia Ruskin University and Oxford University (at time of writing).
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. Join us in signing up to the World Community Grid initiative.
Find out more about World Community Grid and how to sign up at: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/
Mobas is a creative, digital agency based in Cambridge, offering a number of lasting web solutions from responsive web design, digital consultancy and search engine optimisation. Find out how you could benefit from better digital support by contacting us today.
