Have you ever been sitting at home, using your computer, waiting for a webpage to load or a PDF to come up on the screen? Perhaps you’re into digital photography and have blankly stared at the screen waiting for pictures to transfer or save.

Just recently, I have been doing a fair bit of editing of home videos and even with a fully loaded dual processor computer running with multiple threads (essentially running 4 CPU’s!), rendering the video to a final product can take hours.

Now, think of the number of scientists these days who rely on computers to process their research and use supercomputers to computate complex calculations. Some of their projects make yours look like childs play. (In my case, some of my videos were of my child playing…)

About a year or so, I came across a project called the World Community Grid (http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org). Initially started out and back by IBM as a network for AIDS research, the World Community Grid now supports 5 projects through its networked super computer – one made of of home computers like yours and mine.

See, I leave my computer on 24/7 to reduce wear on components and decrease the amount of time I have to wait when I want to use it – sure, I have to wait for the monitor to come out of sleep mode, but I don’t have to sit through the entire start up process. Well, using the internet, the World Community Grid has found a way to use your computers “down time” to work towards scientific breakthroughs. In a recent newsletter, the organization indicates that “the computer power that our volunteer community has donated equals one PC running nonstop for more than 76,000 years…”

All you have to do is download a small and quick program from their website, install it and register, and the process becomes seamless. It does not slow down your computing, it does not share confidential information, and it uses very little power. The benefits that your participation can bring to the project can be enormous and life saving.

I guess this little piece of education is not so much HR related, but more of one of resources to help humanity. This is simply one cause that uses existing resources and requires little effort on the parts of many to accomplish some great things. The more computers that are part of the network, the faster breakthroughs can be made. Please check out their website at www.worldcommunitygrid.org for more details and recent press releases.

Happy computing!