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Weekend Diversion: The Best (and Easiest) Charity Ever! [Starts With A Bang]
“You cannot hope to build a better world without improving individuals. We all must work for our own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity.” -Marie Curie
Most of us remember the importance of being charitable on a few rare occasions throughout the year, most commonly around the year’s end. But what about the rest of the year? Obviously, we don’t have an unlimited amount of resources, so for most of us, it’s not a viable option to do as Magnolia Electric Company suggests, and
But what if I told you there was a way to donate to charity, help advance science, and give yourself a chance to win a nice sum of money, at really no cost to you?
May I present to you The Charity Engine, the best supercomputing project I’ve ever heard of. You might have heard of individual projects like Einstein@Home, which has found 16 pulsars since its inception, or SETI@Home, which sifted through telescope data for signals of extraterrestrial intelligence. Both of these relied on sending unprocessed data to individual computers all across the internet, having users donate their spare processor time to doing these computations, and sending the finished work back to the server. This basic idea — borne from the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing — is the core of the Charity Engine.
But the Charity Engine goes far beyond any of these projects. Let’s say you’ve got an enormous computing job and not enough computing power to do it. I don’t care whether you’re a scientist, a University, or an independent company, where do you go? Enter the Charity Engine!
Charity Engine takes enormous, expensive computing jobs and chops them into 1000s of small pieces, each simple enough for a home PC to work on as a background task. Once each PC has finished its part of the puzzle, it sends back the correct answer and earns some money for charity – and for the prize fund. (It also earns more chances to win.)
Where does the money come from? Science and industry. The grid is rented like a giant supercomputer, then all the profits shared 50-50 between the charities and the lucky prize winners.
Charity Engine typically adds less than 10 cents per day to a PC’s energy costs and can generate $10-$20 for charity – and the prize draws – for each $1 of electricity consumed.
It is the most efficient way to donate to charity ever invented.
As you can see, above and below, they’ve got an impressive array of charity partners, and a strict commitment to only rent the grid to ethical users, and to treat you, the donor, ethically, too.
You can follow them on facebook and twitter, and by joining, you can become part of what they’re hoping will become the world’s fastest supercomputer within a single year! For each additional dollar (or pound, or euro) you spend on electricity on this application, you generate about twenty times as much for the Charity Engine, which gets split, 50/50, between their charities and their users. (That’s you!) And you never have to think about it; it only uses your CPU’s idle time, and turns itself back off as soon as you try to use your machine again! (The worst thing it does is make itself your screensaver and require a restart after installation.)
Best of all, you’ve got a great reason to support them: they come certified by Starts With A Bang! Let’s say you want to, I don’t know, simulate the formation of a galaxy — from scratch — in the Universe?
(Video credit: Fabio Governato et al./U. of Washington/NASA Advanced Supercomputing.)
You and hundreds of other people, right? Who decides whose project is worthy of the Charity Engine’s power? They’d need some kind of expert to help them decide, right?
There’s an entire science panel, and yours truly sits on it, to help decide which projects get the 5-10% of the grid permanently reserved for pure science! So you’re not just supporting charity, you’re supporting legitimate science, hand-picked by me and the rest of the science panel! (Plus, their CEO is a huge fan of this blog, so you know there’s good taste involved here!)
Read more about them at crunchbase, Fast Company, and one of Charity Engine’s charity partners, OxFam. This is a great opportunity for everyone to support science, help charity, and — for those of you who feel lucky — maybe win a small fortune while you’re at it. How can you not feel good about this; get started and help make something wonderful happen today! Read the comments on this post…
Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club
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