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The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a distributed computing infrastructure intended to be useful to fields beyond SETI. It is being developed by a team based at the University of California, Berkeley led by the project director of SETI@home, David Anderson.
The success of SETI@home—which after its launch in 1999 quickly became the most powerful computing network ever assembled—made it clear that distributed computing could be used for many other computing-intensive scientific projects. The intent of BOINC is to make it possible for researchers in areas as diverse as molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics to tap into the enormous but under-utilized calculating power of personal computers world-wide.
In essence BOINC is software that can use the unused CPU cycles on a computer, to analyse scientific data—what you don't use of your computer, it uses.
In December 2003, Sun Microsystems announced it would donate some of its own products—including Solaris servers, and workstations—to BOINC (Vance, 2003).
Projects Using BOINC
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