RATHER than spend their time looking for aliens, the hundreds of millions of PCs idling away in homes and offices could soon be helping to find treatments for HIV and cancer, understand climate change and even prevent famine.
SETI@Home, which sifts through radio signals for any signs of alien intelligence, is the most famous project to tap into PCs’ down time. Now, the World Community Grid (WCG), launched last week in New York, will be the first public computing network dedicated to humanitarian projects. The organisation wants to recruit 10 million PCs to analyse massive medical, environmental and social data…
