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July 23, 2013

Charge Your Android in the Name of Science!

Ever wanted to take part in scientific research but realized you failed high school physics? It’s okay. Your charging Android device can do its part, thanks to UC Berkley.

The Berkeley project called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) is an Android app that allows you to use your charging device and give its extra CPU cycles to help crunch data for scientific studies. The good news is if you’re on a limited data plan, the app works only on Wi-Fi, so no data charges for you.

BOINC has been harnessing donated desktop computing power since 2002. With the new app, the project team hopes to use smartphone and tablet power too. Users can specify which project they would like to support.

The app’s FAQ page states that there are "some technical and legal barriers to doing volunteer computing on iPhones," but there is a possibility for iOS users down the road.

The idea behind the app is simple; scientists in various realms of research, like biomedicine and physics, need a vast amount of computing power. By donating power, the people are, quite literally, helping scientific research by giving their own power to the researchers.

While small, tablets and smartphones are powerhouses, and with Android devices clocking in at 900 million worldwide, that’s a lot of devices to take power from.

The app was created with funding in part by the Max Planck Institute and the National Science Foundation, which has supported BOINC since 2002.

"There are about a billion Android devices right now, and their total computing power exceeds that of the largest conventional supercomputers," said BOINC creator David Anderson, a research scientist at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, according to Phys.org. "Mobile devices are the wave of the future in many ways, including the raw computing power they can provide to solve computationally difficult problems."

Projects included in BOINC’s program are MilkyWay@Home, which creates accurate three dimensional model of the Milky Way galaxy using data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and Asteroids@Home, whose aim is to significantly enlarge our knowledge of physical properties of asteroids.




Edited by Alisen Downey


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