Live figures from the public Green Drain team on World Community Grid, refreshed daily from the platform's team profile. Every number below can be checked against the team's public page.
Research into cancer, disease and water scarcity runs on computation, and there is never enough of it. Green Drain runs dedicated machines on World Community Grid around the clock, contributing to studies at the Krembil Research Institute and its partner institutions. Where equipment would otherwise be retired as e-waste, we rebuild it and put it to work for science.
Office computers taken out of service.
Wiped, moved to Linux, and given to research full time.
Returning finished work units to World Community Grid researchers.
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, 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 at our office. Each machine is a member of the public "Green Drain" team on World Community Grid, so every completed work unit is attributed to the company and visible on the platform's public leaderboards.
Status. The team formed in May 2026 and has run continuously since, 24 hours a day.
Visit World Community Grid
Green Drain operates dedicated research workstations at our office, rebuilt on Linux and committed entirely to research compute. They run BOINC at full capacity around the clock, and every completed work unit is attributed to the public Green Drain team. The live figures above show what that produces.
Retired equipment, productive again. Where hardware would otherwise leave service as e-waste, we rebuild it and put it to work for science. Nothing runs on staff computers: the research machines exist for this purpose, are monitored, and recover on their own after a power interruption. This is a deliberate program with real hardware and real operator attention behind it.
Sustainability link. For a company built around not wasting water, putting hardware to work instead of discarding it is the same instinct applied to a different resource.
Green Drain SustainabilityWorld Community Grid allocates computation to peer-reviewed research projects led by scientists at universities and institutes around the world. These are the active studies our workstations are contributing to.
University Health Network, Toronto, Canada
Mapping Cancer Markers
Computational analysis of patient samples across multiple cancer types, identifying genetic markers that predict disease susceptibility and treatment response. Led by Dr. Igor Jurisica.
University Health Network, Toronto, Canada
Mapping Arthritis Markers
Identifying molecular markers linked to psoriatic arthritis to support earlier diagnosis and more targeted treatment pathways. Canada's largest multidisciplinary arthritis research centre.
Delft, Netherlands
Africa Rainfall Project
High-resolution rainfall modeling for sub-Saharan Africa. 95 percent of the continent's agriculture depends on rainfall. More accurate forecasting supports food security and water resource planning. Led by Professor Nick van de Giesen.
Part of something larger.
186+
peer-reviewed scientific papers published from World Community Grid research since 2004
31
research projects supported across health, climate, and clean-water domains
2.6M
CPU-years of computation contributed by volunteers worldwide
Every work unit our machines return is recorded on the Green Drain team page at World Community Grid. Open it any time and check the totals against this page.