New Facebook Application Lets Users Donate Intel CPU Power to Research

Santa Clara, California-based chip maker Intel has announced the launch of a new campaign, dubbed “Progress Thru Processors,” which will enable users of the popular social networking site Facebook to donate their PC's unused processor power to help research projects like “Rosetta@home.” The project is meant to provide researchers with more processing power in their fight against cancer, making complex calculations easier to handle. The application has just been launched in its Beta form and is now available to all Facebook users.

 

“In the same spirit as Intel’s Small Things Challenge, Progress Thru Processors underscores our belief that small contributions made by individuals can collectively have a far-reaching impact on our world,” said Deborah Conrad, Intel vice president and general manager, Corporate Marketing Group. “By simply running an application on your computer, which uses very little incremental resources, you can expand computing resources to researchers working to make the world a better place.”

 

According to Intel, Facebook users, who can access the application via this link, will have a choice of contributing with their PC's excess processor computing power to the research efforts of climateprediction.net and Africa@home, in addition to the Rosetta@home program. The application has been designed to run automatically as a background process on the computer, without affecting the performance of the system, Intel said. These computer systems aren't required to remain opened when the user is not working on them, as the application is designed to be activated without affecting the PC's performance.

 

For this new project, the world's leading chip maker has teamed up with GridRepublic, a not-for-profit volunteer computing organization that aims to determine computer users to donate their spare processing power for worthy projects looking for that computing resource.

 

“The social and scientific utility of volunteer computing is a function of the number of participants – the more people we sign up, the greater the good we can collectively do,” said Matt Blumberg, executive director of GridRepublic. “We're optimistic that the combination of the Facebook platform and Intel's global reach will help bring large numbers of new people into volunteer computing, enabling research and discovery which would otherwise be impossible.”