The World Community Grid represents a web of 795,000 computers than span all over the world. Founded and operated by IBM, the WCG has been launched about three years ago, on November 16, and it is currently available for the Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and FreeBSD operating system.

Under the motto “technology solving problems”, the WCG represents the world’s largest public computing grid that tackles scientific research projects that benefit the mankind. Until present the World’ Community Grid’s projects have analyzed important topics such as HIV, muscular dystrophy, the human genome and cancer.

However, starting November 6 2007, the World Community Grid will start a new research project that will analyze the human proteins in the fight against cancer.

Called the Help Conquer Cancer, the project will represent one of the most daring projects ever from this field and the World Community Grid will allow the cancer researchers to shorten significantly the amount of time it takes to analyze 90 million images of crystallized proteins. If the researchers had used the existing computing systems, it would have taken 162 years for the project to be realized. But thanks to the World Community Grid powerful system it will take only between one to two years.

"Even with the largest computers we have, it would not be possible to finish this task”, Dr. Igor Jurisica, who leads the research team at the Ontario Cancer Institute from Canada, has said. Excepting Dr. Jurisica’s Institute, there are other two institutions participating in the project: the Princess Margaret Hospital and the University Health Network. The cancer researchers will analyze the results of experiments on proteins by using the data collected by other scientists from the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute from Buffalo, New York.

The researchers will try to better understand the structure of the human proteins and then how the disease-related proteins work. When the results will be ready, they will go into the public domain of the Grid and the cancer researchers from all around the world will be able to use them.