Back in 2001, Mum challenged the EQ community to help her battle a mob more deadly than any raid mob they had, or would, encounter in the game. When EQ2 was launched, she invited that community to also join her in this ongoing epic battle. While the "zone" in which they assisted with this battle closed down on April 27, 2007, there are still more battlefields and more "mobs" to attack!

Unlike any known raid mob, this killer did not attack pixellated characters, but people of flesh and blood, including Niami's mother. The killer in question was cancer, and their battle upon it was, at the time, ground-breaking and revolutionary.

Through the United Devices network, a venture called grid.org conducted vital medical research by using the spare computing power of individual home computers around the world. A small program could be downloaded that would run in the background on your computer that could do such things as screen target molecules against known cancer target proteins and report the results back to the network. The footprint on it was quite small when other programs were running, which allowed it to easily run in the background even when playing EQ or EQ2.

An EQTC team was formed, and additional players were invited to join the battle via a quiet little link on the links page of both sites. I am pleased to announce that the members of the team contributed roughly 100 years of CPU time to grid.org projects. (Exact numbers are no longer available, as the project closed down the team pages already.)

On April 27, 2007, grid.org closed down their projects, with a heartfelt thank you to all who had participated. They also "passed the torch" to other ongoing projects of a similar vein, and I join them in not only thanking the community for their support of this project, but encourage them to investigate the following grid projects:

• World Community Grid, operated by IBM
• Distributed.net, operated by distributed.net
• Compute Against Cancer, operated by National Cancer Institute
• Folding@Home, operated by Stanford University
• climateprediction.net, operated by a group of partners including MIT and Oxford University
• fightAIDS@Home, operated by Olson Lab at Scripps Research Institute
• LHC@home, operated by CERN
• SETI@home, operated by UC Berkeley
• Distributed Folding, operated by a group of partners including Hogue Bioinformatics Research Lab, Mount Sinai Hospital, and University of Toronto

• http://enterthegrid.com/
• http://gridcafe.web.cern.ch/gridcafe/gridprojects/fora.html
• http://www.ogf.org/
• http://www.grid.org.il/Index.asp?CategoryID=224

I would like to thank each and every one of you who assisted grid.org and "Team EQTC" in this project, and I encourage folks to check out the above links and consider joining in any of these worthy projects.

Sincerely,