DETROIT, February 24, 2009 – Palace Sports & Entertainment (PS&E) has become a partner of World Community Grid, joining the IBM Corporation and a growing group of companies, associations, foundations, nonprofits and academic institutions donating idle PC cycles to accelerate difficult humanitarian research.
Worldwide, millions of personal computers sit idly on desks and in homes. 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.
World Community Grid is the largest public humanitarian grid in existence with more than 425,000-plus members who represent more than 200 countries and links to more than one million computers. It is being used for a variety of non-profit and public research projects to benefit mankind including Clean Energy, Help Defeat Cancer and FightAIDS@Home.
The grid provides a way to potentially link the world’s estimated one billion PCs to focus on humanity’s most pressing issues. The program 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.
“Being involved in this program is such an easy way for us to potentially help the science and research community solve some of mankind’s most important issues,” said Tom Wilson, President and CEO of PS&E. “There is no cost for us to participate and it only involves idle computer time so it doesn’t affect our workers’ productivity. We endorse it and we encourage individuals and businesses to become involved as well.”
In addition to donating idle computer time to the cause, PS&E is encouraging members of the community to contribute their idle PC time to assist humanitarian research by joining World Community Grid at www.worldcommunitygrid.org and becoming a member of the PS&E team. Be sure to select the “Palace Sports & Entertainment” team when you register.
To join, individuals should go to www.worldcommunitygrid.org and simply download and install a free, small software program on their computers. When idle, your computer requests 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.
PS&E ownership includes The Palace and DTE Energy Music Theatre, as well as the management of Meadow Brook Music Festival on the campus of Oakland University. Combined, PS&E’s Michigan venues average 300 events and 3.5 million guests annually.
The Palace has been voted Arena of the Year eight times by Performance magazine, twice by Pollstar magazine and is listed annually among North America’s top-grossing arenas. Voted “Best Outdoor Concert Venue” in Pollstar’s 2000 Readers’ Poll, DTE Energy Music Theatre has been listed as the nation’s most attended amphitheater by Amusement Business/Billboard each of the 18 years of PS&E ownership.
