ARMONK, N.Y. -- IBM launched a broad-based drive Tuesday to use the world's untapped computer and Internet capacity to help cure AIDS and meet other healthcare challenges.

Grid computing brings together the collective power of thousands or millions of individual computers to create a giant "virtual" system with massive computational strength that exceeds the power of the world's largest supercomputers.

IBM's World Community Grid is built from computing time donated by thousands of IBM employees, as well as scores of PCs and laptops from computer users around the world.

The first project of World Community Grid, the Human Proteome Folding Project, is sponsored by the Institute for Systems Biology and hopes to identify the proteins that make up the Human Proteome and, in doing so, better understand the causes and potential cures for diseases like malaria and tuberculosis.

Further projects are to be selected by a newly created World Community Grid Advisory Board, which includes representatives from the United Nations, various colleges and foundations.

Anyone can volunteer to donate the idle and unused time on a computer by downloading World Community Grid's free software and registering at worldcommunitygrid.org.

Copyright 2004 by United Press International