Grid Project Puts Unused PCs To Good Works

IBM and several of the world's leading scientific and philanthropic groups Tuesday launched a project that would put millions of PCs to work on research problems ranging from Alzheimer's to disaster forecasting.

Dubbed the World Community Grid, the distributed computing-style project would split complex computing chores into millions of pieces, then parse them out to idle personal computers for the heavy lifting. IBM estimated that there are more than 650 million PCs in use worldwide, each a potential participant in the project to harness the power of large numbers of individual computers in a giant "virtual" system.