Sony Electronics announced that a fall line-up of its VAIO® computers (excluding laptops with Intel Atom based processors notebooks) now come equipped with IBM‘s World Community Grid software, helping provide scientists around the globe with the computing power to help solve humankind’s biggest challenges.

Once activated, the software connects VAIO users with World Community Grid, a network of PCs which pools their surplus processing power to create a free, virtual supercomputer for researchers to tap. The program detects idle time in a volunteer’s computer activity and requests work data for a specific project from World Community Grid’s server. It then performs computations on this data, sends results back to the server, and requests more work. Each computation performed and every PC added provide scientists with critical information that accelerates the pace of research.

The World Community Grid network of PCs has the potential to help scientists cure cancer, battle AIDS, eliminate world hunger, and develop clean energy resources. The collective power of more than 1.6 million PCs gives scientists the equivalent of one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, speeding up research by crunching numbers and performing simulations that would take hundreds of years to perform on typical computers.

World Community Grid currently receives seven computational results from volunteers’ PCs every second of the day—more than 500 million in all—since World Community Grid started up six years ago. In fact, if World Community Grid were just one computer, it would have performed computations for the equivalent of 392,000 years. With hundreds of thousands of volunteers joining together, the possibilities are endless.