World Community Grid, a network of PC owners who donate their unused computing power to solve humanitarian and sustainability challenges, is teaming up with three projects aimed at producing cleaner water – a serious issue for over 1 billion people and increasingly a concern for forward looking-businesses.

To accelerate the pace, lower the expense, and increase the precision of these projects, scientists will harness the IBM-supported World Community Grid to perform online simulations, crunch numbers, and pose hypothetical scenarios. The processing power is provided by a grid of 1.5 million PCs from 600,000 volunteers around the world - and is equivalent to one of the world's fastest supercomputers.

The University of Virginia Watershed Sustainability Project will use World Community Grid to power its "UVa Bay Game/Analytics" project, which models the effects of agricultural, commercial and industrial decisions on the Chesapeake Bay. The “Computing For Clean Water” project, started at China’s Tsinghua University Centre for Novel Multidisciplinary Mechanics, is developing ways to filter and scrub polluted water, as well as convert saltwater into drinkable freshwater, with less expense, complexity, and energy than current techniques. The third project, based in Brazil, is seeking a cure for a common parasite based disease – schistosomiasis – prevalent in tropical regions and transmitted via foul water.

Reprinted with permission from Sustainable Life Media