If you have been keeping up with TBL news, you know that on July 1, 2010 TBL Networks began a partnership with the World Community Grid. The World Community Grid allows organizations with idle compute capacity to donate it for use in research projects ranging from cancer research to clean energy. When idle, a member computer will request data on a specific project from World Community Grid’s server, and perform computations on this data, sending the results back to the server, and then ask the server for new work. Each computation that a computer performs provides scientists with critical information that accelerates the pace of human discovery. In 2010, TBL Networks fired up a 40 machine Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment using VMware View on our Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) dual B-series blade farm and dedicated all of those machines’ computing power to find a cure for cancer.

After almost 3 years of donated processing capacity, TBL’s VMware View cluster has computed 59 years of runtime towards finding a cure for cancer. After five and a half years of working with the World Community Grid, researchers from the Ontario Cancer Institute have used these results to develop tools to identify, analyze and treat cancer, and are now wrapping up their engagement with the Grid and volunteers’ computers. As this project ends, you’ll have the chance to join a live webcaston May 29th to hear directly from the Help Conquer Cancer researchers and find out how the results are being used. The webcast will begin at 12:00pm Eastern Time (16:00 UTC). Please join a few minutes early to give yourself time to log in (you may check if your browser can support the live webcast here). You may access the live webcast on May 29th here – it’s a perfect way to commemorate National Cancer Research Month.

Rest assured, even though the Help Conquer Cancer project with the World Community Grid is ending, TBL Networks will continue to donate its Cisco UCS server computing power to other worthy research projects with the Grid. In addition to a continuing reseach project on fighting Childhood Cancer, the Grid is currently running projects for Schistosoma, Malaria, Leishmaniasis, and AIDS. At TBL, we believe it is important to find uses for technology that not only improve the way we work, but also how we live. That’s not limited to how we balance our own work and personal lives, but how we can use our own technology to help others as well… now that’s techumanity.