Researchers from IBM and Harvard University are joining forces to create the World Community Grid (WCG) project, a project aimed at finding organic materials capable of producing inexpensive and easy-to-manufacture solar cells that could help cut human contributions to global warming by diminishing the amount of fossil fuels burned.

According to WGC’s objectives, the project will include over 413,000 members in more than 200 countries. Each participant will have to donate his idle compute cycles to a massive cloud-based computer of more than one million cores.

The Clean Energy Project is part of IBM's World Community Grid. Its goal is finding new materials for the next generation of solar cells and later on, energy storage devices. The project uses distributed computing to number-crunch molecular equations and people’s effort to help discovering the best molecules possible for organic photovoltaics to provide low-cost solar cells, polymers for the membranes used in fuel cells for electricity generation, and the best way to assemble the molecules so as to create those devices.

On the other hand, provided that IBM and Harvard find the perfect solution, nothing can guarantee that organic solar cells will be a success, as experts have linked photovoltaic dyes to problems such as reliability and durability.

As stated by lead researcher Alan Aspuru-Guzik, volunteers will cut down the computing time to analyze the simulated solar efficiency of a range of organic candidate molecules.  Without the cloud's help the project would take about 22 years, he said, but with the power of distributed computing, it will finish in only 2 years. "It would take us about 100 days of computational time to screen each of the thousands of compounds for electronic properties without the power of World Community Grid," Aspuru-Guzik asserted.