As Habitat for Humanity and the Girl Scouts recruited students at North Carolina's Meredith College willing to volunteer their time, a team from IBM Corp. staked out the campus dining hall with a softer request, seeking only to borrow the calculating power of the students' idle computers.

"It's easy, which people like to hear," said Rebecca Thompson, a 20-year-old senior. "I'll be talking [to friends] and helping fight AIDS at the same time."

Thompson's college-issued laptop, when she's not using it for class, is part of the World Community Grid, an IBM-supported network that senses when private computers are sitting idle, then taps the machines to perform complicated calculations ordinarily performed on expensive supercomputers.

The grid is used being used by researchers at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey in conjunction with teachers and students at Rutgers University to develop cures for cancer, AIDS, and other diseases--and by IBM to demonstrate the potential of borrowing power from the more than 650 million PCs estimated in use around the world.

Grid networks have been used for years to scan radio signals from outer space for signs of extraterrestrial life, to help mathematicians find the largest prime number, and to narrow down the number of potential smallpox vaccines to a few dozen. Now, an increasing number of colleges and universities, businesses, and even K-12 school systems are tapping into the power of grids to extend their computing resources.

Earlier this year, the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA), a group of 24 colleges and universities across 15 states, joined together to form a supercomputer grid that reportedly will give researchers the ability to perform up to 10 trillion calculations a second, paving the way for speedier advancements in the fields of science and medicine.

"The old model used to be that every researcher got his own computer," said Art Vandenberg, director of advanced campus services at Georgia State, one of the first universities to participate in the project, in an interview with the Associated Press in August. "But by partnering, we create a fabric we can all get to."

For Georgia State, the grid quadruples researchers' computing power, allowing scientists to run in a week computer simulations that once would have taken a month. The equipment for that grid, too, is being provided by IBM, which sold the processors, wires, and other pieces to each college at a deeply discounted rate. Georgia State paid $585,000 for a computer that would have cost more than $2 million, Vandenberg said.

"This is the internet equivalent of a 100-lane highway," said Greg Kubiak, director of relations and communications for SURA (see story: http://www.eschoolnews.com/ news/showStory.cfm?ArticleID=6506).

Other leading research universities, including Carnegie Mellon and Purdue, have launched similar projects.