Donate CPU time as well as money?

Howard Lake | 14 August 2000 | News

• Tagged with:
• donated services
• Technology

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.

The idea is already in operation in the form of the SETI@home 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 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 at Berkeley University, USA
• Folding@Home at Stanford University, USA
• Charity Engine
• Stand Up to Cancer – the data processing is made even more enjoyable by making it a mobile game
  

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.