Millions of personal computers sit idly on desks and in homes worldwide. As they wait, every hour hundreds of people contract and die from infectious diseases. While computer owners run their screen savers, millions die from hunger, or environmental disasters devastate whole communities. What if each of the world’s estimated 1 billion computers could be linked to focus on humanity's most pressing issues?

To make this vision a reality, GayCalgary and Edmonton Magazine has become a partner of World Community Grid, joining the IBM Corporation and a group of more than 400 companies, associations, foundations, nonprofits, government agencies and academic institutions. GayCalgary and Edmonton Magazine is encouraging members of the community to contribute their idle PC time to assist humanitarian research by joining World Community Grid at http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ and becoming a member of the GayCalgary and Edmonton Magazine team.

World Community Grid uses grid technology to establish a permanent, flexible infrastructure that provides researchers with a readily available pool of computational power that can be used to solve problems plaguing humanity. Grid technology joins together many individual computers, creating a large system with massive computational power that far exceeds the power of a few supercomputers. Importantly, World Community Grid is easy and safe to use.

To join, individuals should go to http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ and simply download and install a free, small software program on their computers. When idle, your computers request data from World Community Grid's server. Computers then perform computations using this data, send the results back to the server and prompt it for a new piece of work.

"World Community Grid provides busy members of the community with a simple yet effective way to make a difference on problems that plague humanity," said Steve Polyak, Publisher. "We are asking individuals to join World Community Grid as part of our community’s efforts toward this cause. FightAIDS@Home is a part of the World Community Grid and by using the software on our home computers, we can help advance HIV/AIDS research."

Today, hundreds of thousand of volunteers around the globe are donating some of the time when their computers are on but not in use, and World Community Grid is harnessing this power to help advance promising humanitarian research projects. Results on critical health issues have already been achieved, demonstrating World Community Grid's potential to make significant inroads on a great range of future projects that can benefit the world.

You can start making a difference today. Please go to http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ to become a member, and then join our team!