If like me you're a little (lot) cash strapped but feel guilty about not being able to donate to a good cause then this is a fantastic way of helping in a free(ish) but geeky way. It's an app called BOINC developed by Berkeley university with the help of others such as IBM.
What's the deal?
Instead of donating money, you are donating processing power. The app uses your phone's cpu (central processing unit) to help with various projects Berkeley are running in different areas such as astronomy, physics etc. You can choose which project to donate processing power too and when you want to donate (obviously!) so you can feel just that little bit better everyday.
How does it work?
Nowadays many projects require supreme processing power to complete, these are generally stuff like simulations, studying diseases or looking for a certain thing. A simulation in reality might happen over a few fractions of a second but in the virtual world, depending on the processing power of the device running it, generally take days to complete. While institutions like university may have funds for supercomputers, the power of volunteers all around the world willing to donate processing power is incomparable to these supercomputers. This is why there are quite a lot projects similar such as Folding@Home which as well as being available for desktop PCs, became available on the Playstation 3. This was mainly because that was also seen as a powerhouse and it was very successful, the developers with the help of PS3 users set a world record of one petaFLOP of computation power (a huge amount!). Considering how many Android devices there are compared to PS3s sold, surely it shouldn't be too difficult to top that?
Conclusion
In time this app will no doubt have more functionality in terms of a scheduler and more ease of use setting but for now the developers are ironing out a few kinks it has with some Android devices. It's still a solid, functional app that works very well, especially if you set it to work overnight but make sure that you're not relying on your phone as an alarm clock because the battery will almost definitely be drained, or if you are, connect your phone to a charger.
Mo
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