Open-source software platform for computing using volunteered resources

Volunteer or grid computing are two ways to share computer resources with others in order to help work on a bigger project. These often have to do with research, on topics like medicine or the environment.

BOINC is an open source application with which you can connect to a number of projects and share your computer’s resources. At startup the application will display a list of all the projects you can participate in.Select one or simply type in the url if it isn’t included. Afterwards, I’d suggest looking into the preferences to set BOINC to use your computer only when it is idle, such as overnight.Don’t forget to leave it connected to the Internet though. There’s three different views to choose from in BOINC, with the advanced one divided in tabs.This will give you all the statistics on projects, messages, transfers and disk usage information. The best view in BOINC is probably the graphical one, which shows the frequency live in a multicolored wave form and data in a bar graph.

Overall, BOINC is easy to use, even if you don’t have particular knowledge on volunteer computing. The only thing to watch is that BOINC doesn’t use up too much of your resources, or to only launch it when it’s inactive.

A nice way of sharing your computer’s resources for the greater good, BOINC is easy to set up and provide lots of useful statistics.

New: Enable the ability to automatically join teams from installer scripts (Win, Mac)Fix: Elasped time tracking issueFix: Cleanup accessibility items (Mac)Fix: Display both OS version and kernel version on startup (Mac)Fix: Fix bug that caused a new CPID to be generated at startup (Mac)

Changes

• New: Enable the ability to automatically join teams from installer scripts (Win, Mac)Fix: Elasped time tracking issueFix: Cleanup accessibility items (Mac)Fix: Display both OS version and kernel version on startup (Mac)Fix: Fix bug that caused a new CPID to be generated at startup (Mac)

BOINC lets you donate computing power to scientific research projects such as:

Climateprediction. net and BBC Climate Change Experiment

Study climate change

Einstein@home

Search for gravitational signals emitted by pulsars.

LHC@home

improve the design of the CERN LHC particle accelerator

Predictor@home

Investigate protein-related diseases

Rosetta@home

Help researchers develop cures for human diseases

SETI@home

Look for radio evidence of extraterrestrial life

SIMAP

Calculate protein similarity data for use by many biological research projects

SZTAKI Desktop Grid

Search for generalized binary number systems

World Community Grid

Advance our knowledge of human disease (requires 5.