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HTC wants to combine all your Android phones to cure diseases (video)
With smartphones packing so much processing power these days, HTC reckons we can combine them all to do some meaningful number crunching à la SETI@home and Folding@home. We're talking about curing diseases (AIDS, cancer, Alzheimer's and more) as well as searching for alien life. As such, the mobile company has teamed up with UC Berkeley's Dr. David Anderson, co-creator of SETI@home, for the HTC "Power To Give" initiative. To take part, you simply grab the app from Google Play, install it and it'll run in the background when your phone's being charged up plus connected to WiFi. HTC claims that the combined power of 1 million Ones is almost just as good as a one-petaflop supercomputer, so the more the merrier -- including those from other brands. But for now, HTC will first offer its app's beta release to the HTC One family and the Butterfly series, and it'll gradually add more compatible Android devices over the next six months. Isn't it awesome that even Nokia phones can soon partake in this, too? Update: The good folks at HTC have now published a couple of videos explaining this initiative. Check them out after the break.
Donate your Android device's processing power to science with BOINC
If you've ever wanted to help out with a scientific research project but lack the PhD credentials, there's now a much simpler way: all you need is a decent Android device and a new app called BOINC. Similar to projects such as Folding@Home for laptops and desktops, the app harnesses your mobile device's extra CPU cycles to help crunch data for scientific studies. Don't worry, it'll only work if you're on Wi-Fi, so it won't eat up your data plan. You can choose which research endeavor to support from within BOINC, including Einstein@Home and FightAIDS@Home that seek to discover pulsars (stellar remnants) and AIDS treatment, respectively. The app, which you can install from Google Play, was designed to be as unobtrusive as possible and will work as long as you're running Android 2.3 or higher. Generous (and envious) iOS users, sit tight -- the developer is mulling over the possibility of creating an iOS app next.
BOINC client lets Mac users contribute cycles
If you encountered a labful or officeful of Macs in the early 2000s, chances are good that a bunch of them were running SETI@Home, the 'contributed computing' project to search through radioastronomy signals for the telltale signs of an extraterrestrial civilization. While the classic SETI@Home application was closed down in December of 2005, the successor client for grid science is alive and well: BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, recently updated to version 5.8.15 and happily Universal Binary. OS X users are full peer clients along with Windows and Linux machines.You say finding LGM isn't your cup of MIPS? You can contribute to plenty of other projects affecting life here on Earth via the BOINC client and the World Community Grid, a 'meta-project' that aggregates work on several key initiatives (protein folding, cancer, climate and AIDS research) and lets you split up your processing power between your choices. You can sign up and start helping immediately; if you like, join the TUAW team and have your contributions tracked with fellow Macnatics. Note that the BOINC client from boinc.berkeley.edu is several versions newer than the one you get from WCG (5.8.15 vs. 5.4.9), so best to download from the source and then register.Of course, in the interest of environmental sensibility: please don't leave your machine powered on just to run BOINC; save a watt and let it go to sleep when it's truly idle.
