Charity Engine uses computing power provided by a global army of 100,000 volunteers to raise money for charities, such as Oxfam, Amnesty International, and Médecins Sans Frontières. It is a participant of the International Desktop Grid Federation.
Charity Engine raises funds by selling volunteers' computing time in bulk to science and industry. Its volunteers are not asked to support any particular project; they simply agree to let Charity Engine send ethical work to their computers.
The profits raised are shared equally between the charity partners and the volunteers themselves - in the form of regular cash prize draws. "For me it's all about the science," says CEO and founder Mark McAndrew. "We want to turn the World Wide Web into a worldwide computer!".
Now, Charity Engine has launched a new awareness-raising competition to give away three million core-hours of computing to three computing projects (one million core-hours each). Any project, team, company, or individual may enter. However, all applications must use open-source software and be ethically sound, and may use up to 50,000 nodes to deliver the one million core-hours in any time frame from 48 hours to one month.
Furthermore, ten runners-up will each be awarded 100,000 core-hours of computing and all entrants will receive a 50% discount code towards their first purchase of run time on the Charity Engine grid (max 10M core-hours, terms and consitions apply).
To enter 'the Million-Core challenge', simply send Charity Engine a brief description of your project (with the subject line 'million') using this web form. Entries must be received by midnight (UTC) on 17 February.
Find out more about 'Charity Engine' in our feature article 'The 'greenest' volunteer grid of them all?'.
- Andrew Purcell
