Back on July 1, 2010, TBL Networks turned on a 40 machine Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment on our Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) dual B-series blade farm and dedicated all the spare computing power of the system to the World Community Grid and thier efforts to find a cure for cancer. The World Community Grid’s mission is to create the world’s largest public computing grid to tackle projects that benefit humanity. Their work has developed the technical infrastructure that serves as the grid’s foundation for scientific research, and its success depends upon individuals collectively contributing their unused computer time to change the world for the better. When idle, a memeber computer will request data on a specific project from World Community Grid’s server. It will then perform computations on this data, send the results back to the server, and ask the server for a new piece of work. Each computation that a computer performs provides scientists with critical information that accelerates the pace of research. Based on some personal connections at TBL, we decided to focus our unused capacity primarily on the fight against cancer, but our compute resources are available to all Community Grid projects when the cancer research teams are not sending work to TBL.

Shortly after joining the grid computing team, we posted a blog entry on our first two weeks of results at a little over 200 compute days. We estimated then that by the end of 2010, we would have provided a little over 7 years of results. With 10 days left in the calendar year, I am proud to report that TBL has donated 7 years and 201 days of computing power using Cisco UCS, which has allowed us to return 31,882 results to cancer researchers ranking us #1,777 of the over 300,000 organizations participating on the World Community Grid. In the spirit of the season, TBL received a warm “Thank You” from the World Community Grid today for all of our efforts this year, noting that our contribution to advancing research and helping humanity is making a difference every day.