With the IBM supercomputer Watson besting the human 'Jeopardy' champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, last week, a number of tech aficionados from all over the world have been inspired to donate their excess compute cycles to a program which loops the power of individual home PCs into a virtual mainframe.

IBM has recently revealed that after Watson's Jeopardy win, the number of individuals who contribute compute power to the World Community Grid project - which was launched in 2005 - has witnessed a whopping 700 percent increase globally.

At present, the World Community Grid receives seven computational results from members' PCs every second in a day, while performing operations for research institutions worldwide. The Grid barely consumes three extra watts of power on host computers.

Talking about people's increasing interest in contributing to the Grid, Stanley Litow - Vice President for Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs at IBM - said: "Watson's performance on Jeopardy has captured the imagination of millions of viewers who understand the power of computing to benefit humanity."

The diverse research projects for which IBM is donating $500,000 to help them tap into World Community Grid include: Help Fight Childhood Cancer, at the Chiba Cancer Center Research Institute in Japan; Computing for Clean Water, at China's Tsinghua University; Discovering Dengue Drugs Together, at the University of Texas Medical Branch and University of Chicago; and FightAIDS@Home, at the Scripps Research Institute.