LONDON, July 7 /PRNewswire/ --

IBM (NYSE: IBM (http://www.ibm.com/investor)) was awarded the prestigious
Coffey International Award for its application of technical expertise in
innovative ways to address the greatest societal challenges of our time at
the annual Business in the Community (BITC) Awards for Excellence yesterday.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090416/IBMLOGO )

IBM earned the award for World Community Grid 
(http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/), in essence the virtual equivalent in
processing power to a Top 10 supercomputer devoted to humanitarian research.
World Community Grid gains its power from the aggregated spare computing
capacity of 1.3 million PCs belonging to 460,000 volunteers from over 200
countries. For participating members, some with perhaps limited time for
volunteering, it provides the opportunity through the World Community Grid to
make a significant contribution to tackling the Millennium Development Goals.

The Award was presented to Larry Hirst, Chairman IBM Europe Middle East
Africa, by HRH The Prince of Wales, President of BITC, at a garden party
reception hosted by The Prince at his home, Clarence House.

Charles Duff, Corporate Development Manager, Coffey International Limited
and Chair of judges said: "The scale, significance, power and potential of
World Community Grid is impressive. IBM has collaborated with a wide spectrum
of research partners and encouraged businesses, community groups and
individuals to provide free computational capacity to support international
humanitarian projects. The judges salute IBM's programme and hope that the
recognition conferred by this award will encourage individuals everywhere to
join with IBM so that more research can be completed even faster as part of
this exciting, inspiring and innovative development initiative. We also
challenge the business world at large to sign up to World Community Grid and
help grow its potential to achieve even greater impact on the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) and the world's most pressing needs."

World Community Grid is a powerful example of IBM's recently announced
smarter planet vision in which systems from utility grids to healthcare can
be made to work better, as a result of increased data, interconnected
networks and greater embedded intelligence.

According to Larry Hirst of IBM, "A lot of important scientific research
isn't happening. It lacks the funding for the supercomputing capacity that is
needed to execute large and complex calculations. World Community Grid
changes the rules. It's free and available to both public and not for profit
organisations for use in humanitarian research that might not otherwise be
performed."

He continues, "The Grid is about large scale volunteerism -- utilising an
individual's unused computer capacity to address scientific problems -- and
in doing so accelerates research breakthroughs that underpin the Millennium
Development Goals. This helps to make the world a smarter, better place. At
IBM we appreciate winning the BITC Coffey International Award, and it is my
hope that through the award awareness will be increased, more people will
join the grid, and more scientists will submit research proposals."

World Community Grid works when an individual's computer is on but not in
active use. It performs a small piece of complex scientific research,
receiving and returning the results via World Community Grid. There is no
need to leave an idle computer turned on, but while it's active and a user
takes a break for even a few seconds, World Community Grid harnesses the
spare capacity. The accumulation of the idle time in short spurts from
millions of computers is the equivalent of one of the world's top 10
supercomputers.

World Community Grid is operated by IBM and provided for free to support
not-for-profit humanitarian research projects. In total 14 projects are
currently running or have completed their computational phase, involving
teams of scientists from 35 research centres in six countries. Projects cover
three big topics of Nutrition - Disease - Environment. These projects are
contributing to five of the eight Millennium Development Goals.

IBM's investment in World Community Grid has provided research scientists
with over 252,000 years of computer run-time at no cost, and delivered over
290 million research results since 2004. It enables research which would not
otherwise be possible because of the time it would take for the calculations
to run on the scientist's own computers. As a result scientists can focus on
clinical work to develop the real world applications as opposed to IT, and by
significantly accelerating research, develop new approaches and move more
quickly into subsequent phases of testing.

More than 400 organisations are official partners of the WCG, and many
thousands more teams have formed through the site. World Community Grid
provides public and community organisations such as UNICEF, United Way and
Aids Action Committee with a resource to generate public awareness and
engagement around their own key issues. It also provides commercial
organisations with another means for them and their employees to contribute
to a variety of social issues. Organisations such as BankInter, Serco and
Ogilvy are partners on the Grid.

For individuals, World Community Grid helps translate interest into
awareness and engagement and promotes volunteerism. This collaborative
technology enables people to contribute, altruistically or for deeper
personal reasons. This is evidenced by the 200-250 new members who join each
day, and by the level of dialogue IBM sees in this online community.

World Community Grid exemplifies how the application of IBM's leading
edge technology and expertise delivers exceptional value. It epitomises one
of IBM's three values: "Innovation that matters for our company and the
world."

To find out more, or to volunteer your computer go to
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/

Notes to editors
    Details of major projects to date:
    -- Fight AIDS@Home (with The Scripps Research Institute): identified over
       40 potential drug candidates in 6 months instead of 5 years. 
       Scientists are now proceeding with laboratory work to develop new 
       drugs.
    -- Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together (with The University of Texas
       Medical Branch and the University of Chicago): identified new 
       potential compounds and are now proceeding with laboratory work.
    -- Nutritious Rice (with University of Washington): identifying rice
       strains with potential to provide better yields, adapt to climatic 
       changes and improve disease and pest resistance - 15 million results 
       returned since launch in May 2008.
    -- Help Defeat Cancer (with The Cancer Institute of New Jersey, which is 
       a Center of Excellence of the University of Medicine and 
       Dentistry-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School): helped prove the 
       scientists' more accurate technique for identifying cancer and won a 
       competitive US$2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of 
       Health to further deploy its system.
    -- The Clean Energy Project (with Harvard University): discovering
       materials to create a more efficient and lower cost solar cell - 1.1 
       million results returned since launch in December 2008.
    -- Help Fight Childhood Cancer (with Chiba Cancer Center Research
       Institute and Chiba University in Japan): discovering drug treatments 
       for neuroblastoma, the most common cause of death in children with 
       solid tumors - 4.9 million results returned since launch in March 
       2009.
    -- African Climate (with the University of Cape Town): Improving climate
       modeling designed to help African farmers with crops. Has recently 
       completed its data collection and research analysis will now begin.



    Contact:
    Joe Hanley
    IBM Communications
    Off: +44-(0)20 8844 6972
    Mob: +44-(0)78 0350 2318
    hanleyj@uk.ibm.com