# Donate CPU time as well as money?

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2000/08/14/donate-cpu-time-well-money/
- Published: 2000-08-14T23:00:00+01:00
- Author: Howard Lake

Donors can give money, gifts in kind, and their time and expertise. The Web might
offer some charities another abundant but overlooked resource: redundant PC processing
time. Will the day come when fundraisers ask supporters to donate their unused computer
processing unit (CPU) cycles?

Major charities working on computer-intensive research projects, such as medical
research charities, could output small packets of data to be processed by thousands
of supporters’ home PCs, saving the time and resources of the charity.

## Redundant processing time

Donors can give money, gifts in kind, and their time and expertise. The Web might
offer some charities another abundant but overlooked resource: redundant PC processing
time. Will the day come when fundraisers ask supporters to donate their unused computer
processing unit (CPU) cycles? Major charities working on computer-intensive research
projects, such as medical research charities, could output small packets of data
to be processed by thousands of supporters’ home PCs, saving the time and resources
of the charity.

## Advertisement

The idea is already in operation in the form of the [SETI@home](http://www.seti.org/science/setiathome.html)
project, which has linked with two million PCs worldwide in its analysis of radio
telescope data in its search for extraterrestrial life.

Businesses are also looking at ways of co-ordinating and selling off this massive
redundant PC power. Can charities make use of this “community computing” development?

Read Howard Rheingold’s [You Got the Power](http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.08/comcomp.html)
in this month’s Wired magazine for an overview of this development, and visit SETI@
home to see it in practice.

## Donate your PC’s processing power

Charities and research organisations have been taking advantage of the potential
of distributed computing via donated PCs since the 1990s. Projects and tools include:

 * [SETI@Home](http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/index.php) at Berkeley University,
   USA
 * [Folding@Home](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sonymobile.androidapp.gridcomputing&hl=en)
   at Stanford University, USA
 * [Charity Engine](https://www.fundraising.co.uk/2012/05/10/charity-engine-donating-spare-computing-power-good/)
 * [Stand Up to Cancer](https://www.fundraising.co.uk/2014/10/09/stand-cancer-mobile-game-attracts-volunteer-citizen-scientists/)–
   the data processing is made even more enjoyable by making it a mobile game

## Comments

### By: HowardLake

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2000/08/14/donate-cpu-time-well-money/#comment-2808
- Published: 2015-05-05T15:18:00+01:00

Has this approach continued into the days of mobile smartphones? It has. As of January
2015, Folding@Home is available as an app for Android devices. It was downloaded
150,000 times from Jan-March. Any one time, 53,000 phones were using it at the same
time.
 Vijay Pande, a biomedical scientist at Stanford University, told Wired UK“
this is twice as fast as any supercomputer in the US”. [http://folding.stanford.edu](http://folding.stanford.edu)

### By: HowardLake

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2000/08/14/donate-cpu-time-well-money/#comment-2809
- Published: 2017-09-28T10:49:00+01:00

Donating spare capacity is similar to crowdsourcing. We’ve got some ideas and examples
at
 [https://fundraising.co.uk/2014/02/04/mobile-gamers-help-cruk-citizen-science-cancer-research/](https://fundraising.co.uk/2014/02/04/mobile-gamers-help-cruk-citizen-science-cancer-research/)
with more in the comments section. In 2008 Oxfam crowdsourced the design of some
of its campaign posters: [https://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/sep/29/advertising.marketing.pr](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/sep/29/advertising.marketing.pr)
and, by one of the selected creators (“Give a hoot if you hate poverty”): [http://www.kevinbaldwin-writer.com/ads—relatively-recent](http://www.kevinbaldwin-writer.com/ads---relatively-recent)