Charity Engine, the volunteer computing grid operated by the Worldwide Computer Company, announced it will donate three million core-hours of computing to three worthy computing projects. Each will receive one million core-hours.
Like other volunteer computing projects, such as SETI@home and Folding@home, Charity Engine harnesses the distributed computing power of thousands of Internet-connected devices, using the open source grid framework BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). Like many of its predecessors Charity Engine is focused on using spare computing cycles for good causes, but it also sells some of that computation in order to support a greater variety of charities and award prizes to users. Profits are split three ways, between the company, the charities and the prize winners (many of whom donate the award back to charity pool, which includes Amnesty International, Doctors without Borders and CARE International).
Any project, team, company or individual may enter as long as they are aligned with Charity Grid’s ethical mission. All applications must use open-source software and apps that belong to the user can be imported for a fee. Users can harness up to 50,000 nodes to access the one-million core-hours in a time frame ranging from 48 hours to one month.
In addition to the three main prizes, ten runners-up will receive 100,000 core-hours of computing and all entrants will receive a 50 percent discount towards their first purchase of run time on the Charity Engine grid up to 10 million core-hours.
“[Selected projects] will be those which we feel are the most worthwhile, interesting and which would either benefit most from the free computing or be *of* benefit to the world of volunteer computing by virtue of their participation,” says Charity Engine CEO Mark McAndrew. “Until now, the (vast, idle) computing resources of the Internet have been off limits to all but a handful of the most popular projects – and even they can only access a fraction of it. We intend to make it available to everyone.”
Interested parties can apply for the award by sending a brief description of their project to http://www.charityengine.com/contact. The deadline is midnight Feb. 17, 2015, GMT.