IBM says thus far more than 64,000 people have donated over 8,250 years of aggregated runtime to the grid, which is being made available to the Human Proteome Folding Project, a kicker to the Human Genome Project that is trying to understand the mechanisms by which proteins fold and unfold themselves in our cells as they do the things that keep us alive or, if they don’t work properly, kill us with diseases.
Marist College, a liberal arts school located in IBM’s Poughkeepsie, N.Y., stomping grounds, has donated the processing capacity of its 7,000 PCs and laptops to the WCG project. Marist is also where Linux on the mainframe was created, incidentally, and despite its self-proclaimed liberal arts bent, Marist offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science. IBM Pokie is where Big Blue has designed and manufactured mainframes since there were mainframes.
