Five Things BOINC Lets You Do with a Smartphone
Someone once said, “As soon as a fashion is universal, it’s out of date.” They could have been talking about smartphones. With new mobile handset models appearing more and more on a cycle with the twice-yearly global fashion show circuit, the market lifespan of a cell phone is becoming roughly equivalent to last season’s outfit.
What this means is that you may have a not-so-old smartphone (or maybe more than one) sitting around. There are numerous worthy causes where you can donate your gently-used device—the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Cell Phones for Soldiers—to name a couple.
Or, you can volunteer that phone's processing power to:
- Help fight childhood cancer
- Search for spinning stars called pulsars
- Accelerate research into new drug therapies for HIV-AIDS
- Predict global warming
- Help develop low-cost and more efficient ways to provide clean water
A new Android app called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), created by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, allows smartphone users to contribute their phone's processing power to scientific research when charging their phones. You may remember that BOINC software was originally developed for computers to support the SETI@home project, one of whose endeavors was to search for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence.
BOINC creator David Anderson, a research scientist at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, said: "There are about a billion Android devices right now, and their total computing power exceeds that of the largest conventional supercomputers. Mobile devices are the wave of the future in many ways, including the raw computing power they can provide to solve computationally difficult problems."
The BOINC app runs only when a device is plugged in and only after the battery is more than 90 percent charged, so it won't run down your battery. Data transfers over Wi-Fi, and a device’s plan data limit is not affected.
There are currently eight projects available to support using BOINC: Einstein@Home; IBM’s World Community Grid (including the FightAIDS@Home and Help fight Childhood Cancer projects); TheSkyNet POGS; Asteroids@home; OProject@Home; PrimeGrid; and Yoyo@home.
A version of BOINC for Android-based mobile devices is available in the Google Play store and works on Android versions 2.3 or later. It’s also available on the Amazon app store for Kindle Fire.
What about iPhones and iPads? Organizers note that while there are currently technical and legal barriers to performing volunteer computing on iPhones, there is a possibility that iOS users will be able to participate in the future.
