When you think of charity you tend to think
of just giving pages, friends of a certain age doing marathons or people
sitting in bath tubs full of baked beans to send cash into the BBC to keep
Pudsey socially relevant with the latest spotted eye patch, Gucci no doubt.
Personally this isn’t for me. Why can’t
charity be something much more in line with my own beliefs and interests. I’m
not sure if I’ll ever run a marathon and the idea of beans simply offends me, I
think it’s more the assumption that everyone likes beans is the thing that
really irritates me. Like the Beatles.
Moving on from my own irritations this was
supposed to be about charity and how it can start at home and be more relevant
to yourself.
I was first introduced to BOINC during my
time at university in Sheffield. BOINC is a community based grid computing
program which allows to you donate CPU cycles to crunch numbers for charitable
purposes. Very few of us use 100% of the
resources our computer possess. BOINC uses a portion of this power to help
solve mathematical problems or run test models for all sorts of different
organisations. From searching for aliens to searching for a cure for cancer,
trying to solve historical mathematical problems or helping analyse the Ebola
virus, there is something for everyone.
Most charities can’t afford super
computers to help with all their research, grid computing allows normal every
day computers to link together to form a grid powerful to generate 6,187.945
TeraFLOPS.
Here at DSCallards we have signed up to the
world community grid project and we use our old hardware to run BOINC and help
all of causes here:
It’s a great way to repurpose old
hardware which would have otherwise been thrown away. We are currently in the
top 500 contributors in the UK and climbing.
Written by Luke Johnson, DSCallards.
