From PCs to smartphones, we see things moving in that direction almost on a daily basis. The latest thing that’s following this trend is using your smartphone’s idle time to work for science.
The new application, created by researchers at UC Berkeley, will use the power of your mobile device to do some number crunching while your phone is charging. Called BOINC, it will start “doing its thing” after the battery is more than 95% charged and only communicate with computing projects through the Internet when connected via WiFi, though you can manually tweak these settings.
At the moment, the application supports several popular computing projects, including Einstein@Home, which searches radio telescope data for spinning stars called pulsars; and FightAIDS@Home, which searches for more effective AIDS therapies as part of IBM’s World Community Grid. And that’s just a start with additional project waiting the pipeline, such as UC Berkeley’s SETI@home that analyzes radio telescope data in search of intelligent signals from space.
Finally, it’s worth adding that the iOS version is also in development and will be launched soon (though we can’t put the date behind the release).
BOINC (FREE) [Google Play Store]