Launch of the Computing for Clean Water Project

This project is provided by Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, in coordination with a consortium of institutions from all over the world, and hopes to understand the molecular scale properties of a new class of efficient and inexpensive water filter materials, which may help to satisfy demand for inexpensive, clean drinking water in developing countries.

Imagine your great-grandchild waking up 40 years in the future on a hot summer day and struggling to find a glass of cool, clean water. While it might be hard to imagine today, supplies of clean safe drinking water are diminishing all over the world, making this a very real possibility.

As the world population continues to increase, the need for safe, clean water climbs as well. Certainly, access to safe drinking water has improved steadily and substantially over the last decades, but a lack of this precious resource is a major challenge facing much of the developing world today.

In addition, contaminated water is a major source of illness and death. Millions of people die every year, due to diseases like diarrhea, that are transmitted through unsafe water.

While water that is unsafe can be made potable by filtration or distillation, these methods have historically been quite complicated and expensive. Desalination of sea water for example, a potentially abundant resource of drinking water, is similarly limited by filtering costs.

Because of this impending crisis, many talented scientists from around the world are investigating new approaches to efficient low-cost water filtering. One recently identified area that shows tremendous promise is the use of carbon nanotubes.

For additional information on this project, please press the Research button in the upper navigation bar or click here.

Press Release

To view the press release for this project please click here.

Participation in the Computing for Clean Water project

Computing for Clean Water is the seventeenth research project to be launched on World Community Grid and one of eight projects currently active, or intermittent. The other seven active/intermittent research projects are:

• The Clean Energy Project – Phase 2 (launched June, 2010)
• Discover Dengue Drugs – Together – Phase 2 (launched February, 2010)
• Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy – Phase 2 (launched May, 2009)
• Help Fight Childhood Cancer (launched March, 2009)
• Help Conquer Cancer (launched November, 2007)
• Human Proteome Folding - Phase 2 (launched July, 2006)
• FightAIDS@Home (launched November, 2005)

For more detailed information and FAQs about each of these projects, please click on the Research button in the upper navigation bar. We thank all of our members for their valuable contributions to the projects to date and hope you will continue to help us process those, as well as this latest project.

Because there are eight research projects running on World Community Grid, your grid agent could receive work units from any of the projects depending on your Project profile. If you prefer, you may elect to focus your computer's time only on particular projects. To do so, press the My Grid button in the upper navigation bar and select My Projects or click here. Work is sent only to machines which meet minimum system requirements set for a particular project. To read more specifics on the system requirements for the Computing for Clean Water project and the other projects, click here.

Project Badge

If a member contributes a minimum of 14 days of CPU Run Time to this project, they will receive a Computing for Clean Water project badge on their member statistics page and next to their member name when they post in the forums. There is a different badge for each research project and beta testing. To read more about badges, click here.

Forums

In addition to providing information about this project, we have created a forum for discussions about the Computing for Clean Water project. To participate in this forum, please press the Forums button in the upper navigation bar or click here. Only forum authors with the title "Computing for Clean Water Project Scientist" are authorized to comment as representatives of their respective research organizations.

Questions?

If you have any questions, World Community Grid provides you with four methods of obtaining assistance: (1) Review the FAQs found in the Help section of the website; (2) Review the forums to see if anyone has asked/answered the question that you have; (3) Ask the question in World Community Grid's Computing for Clean Water project forum found here and a Community Advisor or a more experienced member will provide an answer; or (4) Send an email to the support desk from the Contact Us link found at the bottom of every page of the website (except in the forums).

We thank you for contributing to the Computing for Clean Water project.