What is the World Community Grid?

What if your computer could do volunteer work?
What if your computer could do volunteer work?

What if you could support causes you care about while reading this post? Your device’s unused computing power can help scientists tackle diseases like COVID-19, Cancer, HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and Zika, or environmental challenges like clean energy, among other humanitarian issues.

The Challenge

A single scientist may have an idea that could change lives. But alone, they may lack the power and resources to achieve this goal.

Alone, a scientist faces a lifetime sifting through millions of chemical compounds to locate the handful that could be useful. Computer modeling can streamline the task by identifying the most promising candidates. But efficient computer modeling requires access to supercomputers, which are rare and expensive.

Like bees in a hive, each volunteer performs a tiny but crucial role in shaping the bigger picture.
Like bees in a hive, each volunteer performs a tiny but crucial role in shaping the bigger picture.

To solve this issue, the World Community Grid brings together volunteers from around the globe to share the load, harnessing unused computing power from their devices. Like bees in a hive, each volunteer performs a tiny but crucial role in shaping the bigger picture.

The World Community Grid

The World Community Grid is an IBM1 philanthropic initiative that enables anyone with a computer or Android device to donate unused processing power to scientific research on health, poverty, and sustainability.

Some projects recently backed by the World Community Grid.
Some projects recently backed by the World Community Grid.

The World Community Grid is a global community that encompasses more than 780,000 volunteers and more than 450 partner organizations2. Together, they have already contributed the equivalent of more than two million years of research to WCG projects. Every day, they perform more than 900 thousand scientific calculations on their devices3.

Open Science

All the research teams supported by the WCG share the commitment to making their data and findings public. As of the writing of this post, the research partners have already published more than 60 peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals4.

Join the World Community Grid today

You can also start supporting those humanitarian research efforts happening around the globe by becoming a volunteer today.

As a volunteer, you simply install a non-invasive application on your computer or Android device and get on with your day. When your device is idle, it connects to the World Community Grid and requests a virtual experiment to work on, helping scientists get several steps closer to that life-changing solution.

WCG volunteers are never just checking their emails, just making coffee, just sleeping. While they get on with their day, their devices are helping with life-changing scientific research.

Become a World Community Grid volunteer today!


This post was based on the official WCG Marketing Toolkit.


  1. IBM and World Community Grid are trademarks of IBM. ↩︎

  2. Current partners can be found here↩︎

  3. Current Global Statistic data can be found here↩︎

  4. The list of published papers can be found here↩︎

Gabriel H. Nunes
Gabriel H. Nunes
PhD candidate in Computer Science

Physicist and Computer Scientist