Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is an open-source platform that lets scientific projects distribute computation across volunteers’ computers, often while they are idle.

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Volunteer computing: A form of distributed computing in which people donate their devices’ spare processing capacity to shared projects. BOINC is a widely used platform for organizing volunteer computing projects.
SETI@home: A scientific project that analyzed radio-telescope data for possible signals from extraterrestrial intelligence. It became BOINC’s best-known early project and helped popularize volunteer computing.
David Anderson: A computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the development of BOINC. Anderson directed the project that turned SETI@home’s infrastructure into a reusable platform.
Folding@home: A distributed-computing project that uses volunteer devices to simulate protein dynamics and support biomedical research. It is a major volunteer computing project with its own infrastructure rather than a BOINC project.
Work unit: A discrete computational task that can be assigned to a worker and returned with a result. BOINC projects split larger computations into work units that clients process independently.
Climateprediction.net: A climate-science project that uses distributed computing to run large ensembles of climate simulations. It demonstrates BOINC’s use for computationally intensive climate modeling.
University of California, Berkeley: A public research university in Berkeley, California, founded in 1868. BOINC was developed at Berkeley and its name preserves that institutional origin.
Cloud computing: On-demand access to computing resources delivered as services over a network, typically from managed data centers. Cloud resources are centrally provisioned and paid for, unlike BOINC’s donated volunteer devices.
BOINC client: Software that downloads assigned tasks, computes results, and returns them to a BOINC project server. This software runs on volunteers’ computers and performs the assigned project work.
Einstein@Home: A volunteer computing project that searches astronomical data for signals from spinning neutron stars and other sources. It uses BOINC to analyze data from gravitational-wave and radio observatories.