World Community Grid

**Oj0** · 20-07-2011, 11:02 AM

What is World Community Grid?

Some of you have have heard me talking about World Community Grid, or WCG, and wondered what it is. According to Wikipedia, WCG is "an effort to create the world's largest public computing grid to tackle scientific research projects that benefit humanity. Launched November 16, 2004, it is funded and operated by IBM with client software currently available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and FreeBSD operating systems.

Using the idle time of computers around the world, World Community Grid's research projects have analyzed aspects of the human genome, HIV, dengue, muscular dystrophy, cancer, influenza, rice crop yields, and clean energy. The organization has so far partnered with over 400 other companies and organizations to assist in the work and has over 561,000 registered user accounts."

What do I gain from running WCG? Does it give payouts like BitCoin?

Unfortunately if you're looking to score a quick buck this isn't for you - you're donating your processing power, unlike BTC where you get paid for the power. The deciding factor is going to be what your wants are: Do you want to make a bit of money no matter what your system is actually doing? BitCoin's for you. Do you want to contribute to the good of mankind? Carry on reading...

How do I get started?

1. Firstly, head over to World Community Grid - Home and click the Join button:

2. Next, enter your registration details. You can use "Is this name available?" to check availability of your desired nickname, then click Continue.

3. On the next screen you can select the projects you would like to join. The defaults are fine unless you'd like to focus on one at a time. Note that the Clean Energy project has uploads of up to 90MB, so unless you're on a high speed uncapped account rather don't join. Again, click Continue.

4. You're now at the download page, close this and head over to http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php. The client download from the WCG site doesn't support graphics cards should you later decide you wish to participate in something such as GPUGrid. Follow the link above and click the download button.

5. Open the installer and click Next.

6. Accept the license agreement and click Next.

7. Here we need to change a few settings. Click Advanced and make sure that only the bottom box is checked. Using the protected account will stop GPUGrid and the like from working, the screensaver just uses CPU power which would be better served doing some work. Click Next.

8. Click Install.

9. Wait for the installation process to finish (it shouldn't take a minute) and click Finish.

10. You will be prompted to restart. This may not be necessary, although you might get invalid work units if you don't restart. Save everything that you need and click Yes.

**Oj0** · 20-07-2011, 11:03 AM

11. Once you've restarted, you should get the following on your screen. Click Next.

12. Scroll down the list, select World Community Grid, and click Next. Wait while it connects to the server, this will only take a few seconds.

13. Enter the username and password used to register on the WCG website in step 2 and click Next. Again, wait as it connects to the server.

14. Click Finish.

15. Click on Advanced View on the window which remains.

16. You'll now be presented with the BOINC client as shown below.

17. Click Tools, Computing preferences... and change the percentage right at the bottom from 60.00% to 100%. All other settings should be fine as is.

You're now up and running

Please let me know if there are any questions.

**SilvRav** · 21-07-2011, 01:54 PM

and what is the monthly bandwidth use?

**LuMpY** · 21-07-2011, 02:01 PM

once i have my adsl line in, i my look at this

**Oj0** · 21-07-2011, 02:39 PM

Originally Posted by SilvRav

and what is the monthly bandwidth use?

It varies greatly. If you do Clean Energy exclusively on an i7 with HT you can be doing... One work unit every ~5 hours, so about five work units per day per thread which is 40 work units per day at about 90MB each... It can be over 3.5GB per day. Alternatively something like a cancer project would be about 500KB/work unit, or 40*0.5 = 20MB/day or 600MB/month. Running a multitude of projects I'd say budget about 2GB/month for an eight threaded chip.