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Charity Engine

Company type	Ltd.
Industry	Volunteer computing
Founder	Mark McAndrew
Headquarters	Manchester, United Kingdom
Key people	Mark McAndrew, Matt Blumberg, Mark Roberts, Stephen Wolfram (advisor)
Products	Charity Engine PC app
Owner	The Worldwide Computer Company Limited
Website	https://www.charityengine.com/

Charity Engine is a free PC app based on Berkeley University's BOINC software, run by The Worldwide Computer Company Limited. The project works by selling spare home computing power to universities and corporations, then sharing the profits between eight partner charities and periodic cash prize draws for the users; those running the Charity Engine BOINC software on their home computers. When there are no corporations purchasing the computing power, Charity Engine donates it to existing volunteer computing projects such as Rosetta@home, Einstein@Home, and Malaria Control, and prize draws are funded by donations.

The company was founded by former journalist Mark McAndrew, who was writing a science fiction novel featuring a similar organisation. He abandoned the book in favour of creating the idea in real life, with the assistance of professor David Anderson from UC Berkeley who created BOINC. The company was incorporated in 2008, but did not start trading until 2011.

The company received €70,000 of EU innovation funding through the Framework Programme 7 (FP7).

Protein folding

In August 2014 the Rosetta@home project reported Charity Engine had contributed over 125,000 new PCs to its grid.

In January 2017, Charity Engine was credited as a significant contributor to solving protein-folding problems in the paper "Protein structure determination using metagenome sequence data" published by the journal Science.

Sums of three cubes problem

In September 2019 a team led by Andrew Booker at the University of Bristol and Andrew Sutherland at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) used Charity Engine to solve the sums of three cubes problem for the number 42, as well as finding solutions for four other numbers in the same problem. The numbers found by Charity Engine are:

${\displaystyle 3=569\ 936\ 821\ 221\ 962\ 380\ 720^{3}+(-569\ 936\ 821\ 113\ 563\ 493\ 509)^{3}+(-472\ 715\ 493\ 453\ 327\ 032)^{3},}$

${\displaystyle 42=(-80\ 538\ 738\ 812\ 075\ 974)^{3}+80\ 435\ 758\ 145\ 817\ 515^{3}+12\ 602\ 123\ 297\ 335\ 631^{3},}$

${\displaystyle 165=(-385\ 495\ 523\ 231\ 271\ 884)^{3}+383\ 344\ 975\ 542\ 639\ 445^{3}+98\ 422\ 560\ 467\ 622\ 814^{3},}$

${\displaystyle 579=143\ 075\ 750\ 505\ 019\ 222\ 645^{3}+(-143\ 070\ 303\ 858\ 622\ 169\ 975)^{3}+(-6\ 941\ 531\ 883\ 806\ 363\ 291)^{3},}$

${\displaystyle 906=(-74\ 924\ 259\ 395\ 610\ 397)^{3}+72\ 054\ 089\ 679\ 353\ 378^{3}+35\ 961\ 979\ 615\ 356\ 503^{3}.}$

References

1. "Spare Some Idle CPU Cycles For Charity This Season". TechCrunch. 23 December 2011. Retrieved 2019-09-22.
2. "How It Works". Charity Engine. Retrieved 2013-04-05.
3. Ward, Mark (2012-05-10). "Idle home PCs could raise cash for Charity Engine". BBC News. Retrieved 2019-09-22.
4. Schwartz, Ariel (2012-01-10). "Charity Engine: The Ethical Supercomputer That Can Win You $10,000". Fast Company. Retrieved 2019-09-22.
5. "THE WORLDWIDE COMPUTER COMPANY LIMITED - Filing history (free information from Companies House)". beta.companieshouse.gov.uk. Retrieved 2019-09-22.
6. "Charity Engine: power of home PCs harnessed as one supercomputer". GOV.UK. Innovate UK. 3 October 2016. Retrieved 2019-09-22.
7. "The Power of Charity For Protein Design". University of Washington. Retrieved 2014-08-15.
8. "Big data (and volunteers) help scientists solve hundreds of protein puzzles". GeekWire. 2017-01-19. Retrieved 2019-09-22.
9. "Sum of three cubes for 42 finally solved -- using real life planetary computer". Science Daily. 6 September 2019. Retrieved 22 September 2019.
10. Lu, Donna. "Mathematicians find a completely new way to write the number 3". New Scientist. Retrieved 2019-09-22.
11. Booker, Andrew R.; Sutherland, Andrew V. (2021). "On a question of Mordell". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 118 (11). arXiv:2007.01209. Bibcode:2021PNAS..11822377B. doi:10.1073/pnas.2022377118. PMC 7980389. PMID 33692126. S2CID 220302326.

External links

• Charity Engine Website

• Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing projects
• Volunteer computing