We make drains. Our hardware runs cancer research.
Through the World Community Grid platform, Green Drain runs dedicated research workstations and team-member rigs that contribute computation to active studies at major medical and scientific institutions. The work goes toward genomic analysis, drug screening for pandemic pathogens, and climate modeling.
Green Drain customers are hospitals, food processors, schools, and other facilities where public health depends on getting drainage right. The product reduces risk at the point of installation. Volunteer computing extends the same posture to the research infrastructure that studies human health at population scale: the diseases those facilities exist to treat or prevent.
Compute job in progress on a modern workstation,
or a rack of dedicated research workstations
~720 x 900px
What is World Community Grid?
World Community Grid is a research computing platform operated by the Krembil Research Institute at the University Health Network in Toronto. Volunteers around the world install a small open-source client (BOINC, developed at UC Berkeley) that downloads work units from research servers, computes results when the host machine is idle, and uploads them back. The platform has aggregated more than 2.6 million CPU-years of computation since 2004, supporting 31 research projects across health, climate, and clean-water domains.
Method. Green Drain runs BOINC on dedicated research workstations and on team-member rigs operated by Green Drain employees. Each machine joins the public "Green Drain" team on World Community Grid, so all contribution is attributed to the company and verifiable on the platform's public leaderboards.
Status. First dedicated workstation came online May 2026. Contribution accumulates with each completed work unit.
Visit World Community GridWhere our contribution goes.
Computation is allocated across the research projects currently active on World Community Grid. The active project list shifts as new research programs come online and others complete their compute phase. As of the most recent program update, the platform is processing work for these active studies.
Mapping Cancer Markers
Genomic analysis from patient samples across multiple cancer types, identifying genetic markers that predict response to treatment. Operated by Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, part of the University Health Network in Toronto.
OpenPandemics
Virtual screening of chemical compounds against current and future pandemic pathogens. The library includes waterborne and food-safety organisms relevant to the same public-health questions Green Drain customers face every day.
Africa Rainfall Project
High-resolution climate and rainfall modeling for sub-Saharan Africa, used to support food security planning and water management. A direct thematic connection to Green Drain's core focus on water-system stewardship.
Mapping Arthritis Markers
Computational analysis applied to rheumatoid arthritis, using a similar genomic-mapping approach to the cancer marker project. Identifies disease pathways that could inform diagnosis and treatment strategy.
Research projects on World Community Grid have produced more than 186 peer-reviewed scientific papers since 2004.
Our running contribution.
Live stats from the public Green Drain team accounts on World Community Grid and Folding@home. Refreshes daily from each platform's public stats feed; numbers below are team aggregate.
Wide hospital corridor or clinical setting,
connecting drain customers to the research
~720 x 900px
Drain customers are healthcare facilities. So are the institutions running the research.
Green Drain protects hospital floor drains from sewer-gas escape, biofilm reservoirs, and pathogen aerosolization. The customers buying that protection are the same institutions that treat the cancers, autoimmune diseases, and emerging infectious diseases under study on World Community Grid.
The link. A facility specifying Green Drain to reduce healthcare-associated infection risk is also a facility where computational research into the underlying diseases is one floor away from the patient. Volunteer computing puts our hardware on the same side of that line as our customers.
Honest framing. We donate compute. We are not a research partner of World Community Grid or any of its participating institutions. The contribution is real and verifiable; the relationship is that of a corporate volunteer, not a collaborator.
Green Drain in HealthcareMotherboard or thermals close-up,
or wide view of office computer at work
~720 x 900px
Dedicated machines, not just idle compute.
Green Drain's contribution comes from a mix of hardware. Dedicated research workstations are acquired specifically for this program and run continuously. Team-member rigs are operated by Green Drain employees on hardware they own and run themselves. Office machines complete additional work units during idle hours. In all three modes the machines are doing useful work rather than drawing baseline power without output. This is not passive corporate idle-cycle harvesting; it is a deliberate program with real hardware and real operator attention behind it.
Sustainability link. The posture mirrors the water-conservation case on our products. Both stories are about not consuming a resource (water, compute) without something useful coming out the other side. The waterless drain seal removes the trap-primer water draw; the volunteer-computing program puts otherwise-idle compute toward scientific work and supplements it with hardware dedicated to the purpose.
Practical detail. BOINC's default configuration throttles automatically when a workstation is in active use and pauses on battery, so office machines that participate during idle time do not affect productivity. Dedicated research workstations run BOINC at full capacity continuously, since they are allocated specifically to research compute.
Green Drain SustainabilityGPU-based research compute,
or protein-folding visualization
~720 x 900px
Next: GPU-based research via Folding@home.
Where World Community Grid runs CPU-based computation across genomic analysis, drug screening, and climate modeling, Folding@home runs GPU-based computation focused on protein dynamics. Folding@home is operated by the Bowman Lab at Washington University in St. Louis and has supported research into cancer, Alzheimer's, COVID-19, Parkinson's, and Huntington's disease.
Status. Planned. Expansion to Folding@home is on the program roadmap, gated on GPU-capable hardware coming online. Once running, contribution will be attributed to a public "Green Drain" team account on Folding@home, separate from the World Community Grid team but representing the same organization.
Why both platforms. CPU and GPU computation address different research problems. Running on both expands the range of studies our hardware can contribute to. Both platforms publish public team statistics, so attribution stays verifiable.
Visit Folding@homeSame focus, different scale.
Green Drain reduces public-health risk at the drain. Volunteer computing extends that posture into the research infrastructure looking at the same questions.