Five years on, what has been achieved?
The World Community Grid is still going strong. The number of projects has reduced, mainly because so many of them are now complete and have achieved what they were intended to. Projects which need huge amounts of data analysed are often health-related so currently we are helping with:
- Searching for treatments for Covid-19 by studying proteins from the virus, as well as preparing for future pandemics.
- Analysing skin samples of people suffering from Psoriatic Arthritis, a form of arthritis which is linked to psoriasis.
- The Africa Rainfall Project, helping to increase crops in in sub-Saharan Africa by improving the accuracy of rainfall forecasting.
- Asteroids@home which analyses the shape and spin of asteroids so that their paths can be better predicted.
According to the app, in the 5 years that our computers have been contributing they have returned 16,963 results, earning us 9,474,538 points. While these numbers are reassuringly large, I don't really know what they mean.
But the real reward is the warm feeling from contributing to global projects which will change people's lives. This is using the internet in the way that its pioneers envisaged back in the 1960s. I wonder how much longer it can last…