The Charity Engine is a project that harnesses the unused computing power of internet-connected computers and devices around the world to form a volunteer computing grid. This grid would be over 10 times more powerful than the world's fastest supercomputers combined. The Charity Engine aims to incentivize participation through regular $1 million prize drawings for volunteers. It would also donate $1 million regularly to top international charities. With just 2% of the world's PCs participating, the Charity Engine grid could transform scientific and medical research while having minimal costs and environmental impact by utilizing existing hardware.

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2. The most powerful
computer on the planet
The Charity Engine™ is a social and computing revolution, finally making use of the largest untapped reserve of
computer power in the world; the spare capacity of the Internet itself.
Only a decade before now, the typical PC had a 300 MHz processor and 64 MB of memory – a specification exceeded
by today’s mobile phones. It could run programs like Windows 98
and Office 97, but had little ‘spare capacity’ to do much else. The
early Internet was equally primitive; small, expensive and slow.
Today, the situation is very different. A modern PC is over
100 times more powerful than its counterpart from ten
years ago – and 2 billion of them are now connected
to a lightning-fast, always-on Internet. However, the
vast majority of PCs are still being used for exactly
the same simple tasks as they always have been, their
supercharged processors almost entirely redundant.
Incredibly, the average ‘CPU load’ of a modern PC
really is just 1%, meaning 99% of the Internet’s total
computing capability is doing absolutely nothing at
any given time.
Technically, it is quite simple to make millions of home
PCs work together, the real problem is persuading
millions of PC owners to work together. Successful ‘volunteer computing’ networks do already exist, including
the famous SETI@home, noted in the Guinness Book
of Records as the largest-ever calculation with some
5m volunteers having donated over $1Bn-worth (!) of
computing time since it began in 1999. Many other
similar projects exist.
However, despite some very worthy causes indeed, less
than 1% of the Internet is persuaded to participate in
any form of volunteer computing. Paying for individual
PC time is not viable (it has been tried – the chance
to earn $1 per week impresses nobody) and so The
Charity Engine™ has designed an elegant solution to
this traditionally insurmountable incentive problem.
2000 2010 Rather than offering to pay a million people $1 per
week, every few weeks we have a prize draw and
pay one lucky volunteer a huge, attention-grabbing
power used CPU RAM RAM CPU power used jackpot of $1,000,000 instead. Simultaneously, The
300Mhz 64Mo 2Gb 3Ghz
Charity Engine™ also shares another $1m between ten
top international charities – hence the name.
Prize draw entries are earned for simply running The Charity Engine™ screensaver, so the longer a PC has worked
for the grid, the more chances its owner has to win the next $1m. Once the screensaver is downloaded the process
is entirely automatic, although participants retain complete control over how much of their PC resources it can use.
Ultimately, The Charity Engine™ could become one of the most popular free downloads in the history of the Internet.
Repeating $1m jackpots, continuous fund-raising for charity and helping to utterly transform scientific and medical
research – not bad for a free screensaver.
With just 2% of the world’s PCs using it, The Charity Engine™ grid will be ten times more powerful than every
supercomputer on Earth... combined. Its value to climate research, medicine, physics,
engineering and software development will be literally beyond comparison.
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3. Start-up and
operational requirements
Computing
power
One of the prime reasons for using volunteer grid computing is the price/
performance ratio – typically over 20 times the cost efficiency of conventional
supercomputing. The bulk of the hardware is already in place, interconnected
and powered-up. It requires no vast, air-conditioned office space to contain
it, nor any specialist maintenance or upgrading, as individual PC owners look
after their own machines.
The grid is effectively self-repairing, self-improving and always switched on –
for free. These three factors make its total cost of ownership untouchable by
any conventional supercomputer, but when the potential raw performance
is also considered, public-based grids look even more impressive.
5 000 000 $
100 000 000 $
As of September 2010, the world’s fastest supercomputer is the Cray Jaguar, a
6000 sq ft monster that weighs over 200 tonnes. The Cray Jaguar was the first
machine to achieve 1750 trillion calculations per second, or 1.75 petaflop. It
is incredibly fast; the next 500 fastest supercomputers only produce about
10 petaflops between them – and consume four times more electricity than
New York City to do so. Yet, despite these huge numbers, the idle Internet
dwarfs them all.
Operational
If it were a country, the Internet would rank as the 4th most power-hungry cost
behind only the USA, China and Russia. The Cray Jaguar has 200,000
processors, the Internet has 2 billion.
the CRAY JAGUAR Volunteer grids like SETI/BOINC and Folding@home continually
reaching up to an incredible 8 petaflops of raw computing
performance for their minimal outlays and overheads, whereas the
the Cray Jaguar produces ‘just’ 1.75 petaflop and cost over $200
million.
Software is the very least of any grid network’s problems. The“Berkeley
University Open-Source Infrastructure for Network Computing” (aka
BOINC) is a highly successful, completely free software suite for this
exact purpose. Developed from the SETI project, BOINC is currently
being used by over 60 volunteer computing applications on millions
Our partners of home PCs.
The director of the BOINC project (and famously the creator of SETI@
home itself ), Professor David Anderson, is technical consultant to
The Charity Engine™.
The concept is proven and the technology already in place. To
succeed, all a volunteer grid really needs is people.
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4. Charitable
donations
Although the $1,000,000 prize incentive is essential for creating
huge public interest in The Charity Engine™, it is not enough to
maintain it indefinitely. It must be reinforced by something known
to lottery experts as ‘permission to lose’.
The majority of The Charity Engine™ participants will, of course,
never win a jackpot. Although some smaller prizes may be awarded
to keep people happy (much like the UK National Lottery and its £10-
for-three-numbers), even they will be a rarity. Attrition and loss of
interest is a serious issue that can only be addressed by continually
donating massive sums to the very best of good causes.
The Charity Engine™ will therefore begin with the following charity
partners: Action Aid, CARE International, Médecins Sans Frontières,
Practical Action, Sightsavers International, UNICEF, War On Want
and Water Aid.
The Charity Engine™ will also support a series of small projects
for which a single $100,000 donation will be a huge, immediately
tangible benefit. All will be fundamentally related to child welfare
(for example, orphanages and refuges for street children)
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5. The Charity Engine™, the most eco-friendly
method of computing possible
When a typical PC is idle or only doing light work (such as most home and
office tasks) the processor is running at less than 2% of maximum, yet it
still uses 50%-75% of maximum power. The Charity Engine™ screensaver
doesn’t automatically use 100% of your idle CPU though, because
maximum power is not the most efficient. Instead, it runs the processor
up to 60% - which only requires a very small increase in power (8% more,
on average).
No excess heat, no noisy fans, no worries about stressing your PC. This is
the ‘sweet spot’ for efficiency and means that most computers will only
be using an extra 4W when working for The Charity Engine™. That’s less
power than charging an iPhone.
But we can do even better...! Computers produce heat, which can either
be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on where it is. If your PC is
saving you money on your heating bill, then great. If it’s making your air-
conditioning work harder instead; not so great. Cooling is expensive
and wastes energy.
Fortunately for us, it’s always cold somewhere - and everywhere
is cooler at night. The Charity Engine™ will therefore use «winter-
puting», giving priority to computers located on the night-side of
the Earth or in cold climates, especially where the extra heat caused
by processing is actually saving energy, not wasting it. With virtually
no cooling costs, The Charity Engine™ will be the most energy-
efficient supercomputer on Earth.
Of course, this amazing, trillion-dollar machine is already built. If it were
in one place, the Internet would fill the Empire State Building 50 times
over and it requires more electricity than the whole of Japan.
To not use it properly would be the biggest waste of all.
CONTACT
Regis Dubois
Marketing & Sales VP
regis.dubois@charity-engine.org
+44(0)7963006318
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