Consider Helping Science

Barry Quinn
Sep 24, 2017
2 min read

If you have never thought of contributing to the science community, you should reconsider.

You have probably heard of the BOINC project (it is a pretty old project) but if you haven't, don't worry because i got you covered.

BOINC is an open source project that volunteers from all around the world can choose one scientific project (or many) that is assigned to BOINC. Each device that has the BOINC software installed on it, donates some of it's spare CPU, since most devices rarely use all of their CPU power. This helps scientists completing tasks faster since they need a lot of computing power.

Each volunteer’s device will download a fraction of data from scientists servers, perform computations locally, and send results back so scientists can analyze them. The more volunteers are involved, the more computational power is available to speed up analyzing the huge amounts of data and perform the millions of calculations for complex scientific problems. Many researches need to calculate huge amounts of data of simulations or just data, such as researches for the cure of cancer, aids, quakes and climate predictions and even for extraterrestrial intelligence.

If you are still wondering what difference could it possibly make, i'll tell you this:

Let's assume that a drug for a certain type of cancer has recently been discovered that saves millions of lives. To test this drug and release it, researchers must perform a series of complex simulations, which may have taken years to complete due to limited computing power. If they had in their hands twice the computing power they needed it would have been released maybe years ago saving even more lives and possibly now developing a new drug.

If you are worried that BOINCwill slow you down, don't. It monitors your

device’s performance, and stays inactive if your work requires all the computational power of your equipment. Also, BOINC computes only when your device is plugged in and charged, so you don't have to worry about your battery. It works also on smartphones and tablets and it transfers data only over WiFi.

You think it's worth it? Give it a try..

You can download BOINC from here.