Boincteams.com

   2012 started with BOINC reaching a historic landmark - the SETI@Home project reached the 2 billion mark for recorded results. This is the oldest BOINC project and marks a remarkable moment in computer history. Collaborative computing can produce results that would be difficult to get from other systems - especially for that cost.

There are currently said to be roughly 1.2 million registered participants in the BOINC SETI@Home project of which 155,000 are active. They make up 60k teams from 253 countries across the globe and together they produce 100k results each day. This might not sound like much - after all Facebook has 800 million active users - but when you consider online poker sites like Party Poker and their rivals have a combined 7 day average of 62,255 (according to pokerscout.com) you can see that they are doing pretty well.

While the average users deliver roughly 540 TFlops, some have contributed millions of results to the project. But what does this mean to the rest of us? It suggests that volunteer community computing projects are gaining acceptance in the world of computing.

BOINC is now being taken up by a new project called Charity Engine which uses the same 'downtime using' concept and gives half of the proceeds to charity. The other half of the proceeds go to the person who rents out their processor time - in a prize drawing. You are entered into the draw for each 1$ of energy consumed.

This project also allows customers lease the computing power, and this is much cheaper than Amazon's EC2 rate. This all sounds rather good, but we'll have to wait to see how it all works. Charity Engine is allied with a host of good organisations such as Oxfam, Amnesty International and Water Aid amongst others.