You can help IBM fight Ebola by literally doing nothing

You know how your smartphone and computer just do nothing when you’re not using them? You can now put those slackers to work in a noble cause: helping cure the Ebola virus. IBM’s World Community Grid has teamed up with scientists from the Scripps Research Institute with the “Outsmart Ebola Together” project to tackle the deadly plague. The laboratory has been studying the virus for the last decade, and has mapped potential weak points in Ebola proteins. But the process of narrowing down promising drugs is computationally intensive, which is where you and your device come in.

IBM has partnered with the Scripps Research Institute in a project that will allow consumers to donate processing power from their Android smartphones and Windows PCs and tablets to power a computing framework researchers are using in the fight against Ebola. To join the effort, dubbed “Outsmart Ebola Together,” individuals simply need to download a free app that connects them to IBM’s World Community Grid, which can rope together hundreds of thousands of devices to form a virtual supercomputer. The software then assigns each device a series of minitasks, the results of which are uploaded to servers at an IBM data center in Toronto. “Anyone with a laptop or Android device can participate in this project,” said Jen Crozier, VP for global citizenship at IBM. The software is only active when the device is at rest, so participation does not come with a performance hit, IBM said. It’s also secure. Crozier said the World Community Grid has never been hacked successfully.