How IBM's World Community Grid Is Helping Cure AIDS, Cancer, and World Hunger

Fast Company has an article on IBM's virtual supercomputer project, the World Community Grid. It's an implementation of BOINC, which is a generalized distributed computing software architecture originally built at Berkeley for SETI@home, which harnesses donated CPU cycles to process data collected by the Arecibo radio telescope in hopes of finding a signs of intelligent life. The World Community Grid is "tapping the unused processors of half a million people to speed up critical scientific research" in other areas that present "embarassingly parallel" computational challenges - such as bioinformatics and climate modeling.