Charity Engine is a free PC app based on Berkeley University's

BOINC The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC, pronounced – rhymes with "oink") is an open-source middleware system for volunteer computing (a type of distributed computing). Developed originally to support SETI@home, it beca ...

software, run by The Worldwide Computer Company Limited. The project works by selling spare home computing power to universities and corporations, then sharing the profits between eight partner charities and periodic cash prize draws for the users; those running the Charity Engine BOINC software on their home computers. When there are no corporations purchasing the computing power, Charity Engine donates it to existing

volunteer computing Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which people donate their computers' unused resources to a research-oriented project, and sometimes in exchange for credit points. The fundamental idea behind it is that a modern desktop co ...

projects such as

Rosetta@home Rosetta@home is a volunteer computing project researching protein structure prediction on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform, run by the Baker laboratory at the University of Washington. Rosetta@home aims to ...

Einstein@Home Einstein@Home is a volunteer computing project that searches for signals from spinning neutron stars in data from gravitational-wave detectors, from large radio telescopes, and from a gamma-ray telescope. Neutron stars are detected by their pulse ...

, and Malaria Control, and prize draws are funded by donations. The company was founded by former journalist Mark McAndrew, who was writing a science fiction novel featuring a similar organisation. He abandoned the book in favour of creating the idea in real life, with the assistance of professor

David Anderson David Anderson may refer to: People In academia or science *David Anderson (academic) (born 1952), American college professor *David Anderson (engineer) (1880–1953), Scottish civil engineer and lawyer *David Anderson, 2nd Viscount Waverley (1911� ...

from

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

who created BOINC. The company was incorporated in 2008, but did not start trading until 2011. The company received €70,000 of EU innovation funding through the Framework Programme 7 (FP7).

Protein folding

In August 2014 the

project reported Charity Engine had contributed over 125,000 new PCs to its grid. In January 2017, Charity Engine was credited as a significant contributor to solving protein-folding problems in the paper "Protein structure determination using metagenome sequence data" published by the journal

Science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...

Sums of three cubes problem

In September 2019 a team led by Andrew Booker at the

University of Bristol , mottoeng = earningpromotes one's innate power (from Horace, ''Ode 4.4'') , established = 1595 – Merchant Venturers School1876 – University College, Bristol1909 – received royal charter , type ...

and Andrew Sutherland at

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

(MIT) used Charity Engine to solve the

sums of three cubes In the mathematics of sums of powers, it is an open problem to characterize the numbers that can be expressed as a sum of three cubes of integers, allowing both positive and negative cubes in the sum. A necessary condition for n to equal such a ...

problem for the number 42, as well find solutions for 4 other numbers in the same problem. The numbers found by Charity Engine are: :

3=569\ 936\ 821\ 221\ 962\ 380\ 720^3 + (-569\ 936\ 821\ 113\ 563\ 493\ 509)^3 + (-472\ 715\ 493\ 453\ 327\ 032)^3,

42=(-80\ 538\ 738\ 812\ 075\ 974)^3 + 80\ 435\ 758\ 145\ 817\ 515^3 + 12\ 602\ 123\ 297\ 335\ 631^3,

165=(-385\ 495\ 523\ 231\ 271\ 884)^3 + 383\ 344\ 975\ 542\ 639\ 445^3 + 98\ 422\ 560\ 467\ 622\ 814^3,

579=143\ 075\ 750\ 505\ 019\ 222\ 645^3 + (-143\ 070\ 303\ 858\ 622\ 169\ 975)^3 + (-6\ 941\ 531\ 883\ 806\ 363\ 291)^3,

906=(-74\ 924\ 259\ 395\ 610\ 397)^3 + 72\ 054\ 089\ 679\ 353\ 378^3 + 35\ 961\ 979\ 615\ 356\ 503^3.

References

External links

Charity Engine Website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Charity Engine Volunteer computing Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing projects