According to World Community Grid, "Grid technology joins together many individual computers, creating a large system with massive computational power that exceeds the power of a few supercomputers. This capability can be applied, on a global scale, to very large and complex problems for the benefit of humanity."

World Community Grid invites public and not-for-profit organisations to apply to use its grid technology at no cost for projects that benefit humanity. Research projects that benefit from grid technology are those that perform computations that require millions of computer processing units (CPUs) and that can be divided into smaller independent computations. World Community Grid's advisory board, composed of philanthropists, scientists and officials from leading public and private organisations, will review proposals to identify those they consider have the best potential to benefit from World Community Grid's technology and make important progress on humanitarian goals.

World Community Grid supports research that is:

• Focused on solving problems to benefit humanity;
• Conducted by public or non-profit organisations;
• Contributed to the public domain; and
• Accelerated by grid computing technology.

Examples of potential fields of study include:

• New and existing infectious disease research - development of treatments for HIV/AIDS, Malaria, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), etc.
• Genomics and disease - functions of proteins that are coded by human genes and how they might relate to cures for common diseases
• Environmental research - meteorology and severe weather warning, pollution, remediation, climate modeling, and others
• Natural disasters and hunger - earthquake warning, information on improving crop yields and livestock production, and evaluation of the supply of critical natural resources such as water

For more information, including the proposal process, technical requirements, and selection criteria, please review the Request For Proposals.

Click here to download the request for proposals in PDF format.

To submit a project for consideration, please download the proposal application and return to rfp@worldcommunitygrid.org

Click here to download the application form in MS Word.