"Got memory?"

That - borrowed from the well-known dairy industry ad campaign - could well be the tag line for a new worldwide-distributed computing effort, called the IBM World Community Grid, being launched to explore the structure of the 30,000-plus proteins found in the human genome.

The massive grid will consist of the linked efforts of many millions of personal computers that, when idle, can be used to supply the memory and power necessary for the analysis of current and emerging genome data, with the overall effort being termed the Human Proteome Folding Project.

Linking and using PC "downtime" in the effort will be done by grid software developed by United Devices, of Austin, Texas. IBM, of Armonk, N.Y., will buy the software from United Devices, then donate it, plus hardware, technical services and general expertise, to the effort.

"Uniting computer devices in a grid network" - for all sorts of organizations and all sorts of research efforts - "is what we do," said Ed Hubbard, president and CEO of United Devices, though he noted that the volunteer offering of computer power not in use presents a somewhat different twist for this focus.

United Devices was founded in 1999, but Hubbard said that the development of the company's grid.org website to launch a world community grid, plus a project focused on better understanding cancer, sponsored by Intel, provided the company's first success.

"And we took off from there," he said.

In operation, those participating in the new World Community Grid use United Devices' Grid MP technology to download what Hubbard termed "an agent" that periodically notifies IBM when that person's computer is idle and available.

"These machines run our agents or IBM's version, and [the PCs] participate by taking in applications running on the grid, executing them and sending them back with the results," he explained.

People agree to participate "because they like the notion that their machine is turned on and they're not using it and it advances scientific knowledge," Hubbard said.

And, he predicted that 3 million machines already are participating in the effort.

What makes it easy to help is that those participating don't have to do anything after the software downloads.

"The software resides on their machines and makes them available to the overall grid - whatever IBM ends up building," Hubbard said. "It's all automatic; once you install the agent program, you don't have to do anything else at all."

He added that the participant can specify the times that the machine is accessed by the grid to maintain user flexibility.

The project will run concurrently on United Devices' grid website, which Hubbard called the world's largest computational grid dedicated to life science research.

"Never before has a project of this size taken place using grid computing technology," Hubbard said.

The results will be relayed for analysis and investigation to the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, which estimated that the massive increase in computing power will shrink an estimated 300,000 years of conventional computational time to less than 12 months, with the caveat that it will take additional years before any research is translated into vaccines and other biological applications.

Overall, an estimated 650 million PCs are potential project participants, IBM said.

Attachment of the IBM name to the project could serve to attract millions of potential users, said Ken King, vice president of grid computing for IBM. Additionally, the company's participation underlines "the fact that IBM developed a very strong advisory board to identify the project and get other major world organizations to convince people this is the right thing to do - to contribute their idle [PC] capacity."

Once the project is complete, IBM's World Community Grid and United Devices' grid.org site will operate as separate entities running their own individual research projects.

Previous United Devices grid projects have powered public cancer, anthrax and smallpox research projects, Hubbard said. And he listed major pharma firms, such as Novartis AG, of Basel, Switzerland; Johnson & Johnson, of New Brunswick, N.J.; and Sanofi-Aventis Group, of Paris; as customers using the firm's grid software for both R&D and business-processing applications.

Volunteers wishing to participate in the Human Proteome Folding Project can download the software at www.worldcommunitygrid.org.