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Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, also known as BOINC, is a grid computing system that allow researchers to utilise the power of more than 500.000 computers for projects that require a lot of computing power. It’s like having access to a huge supercomputer and with the current 584.000 computers it reaches whopping 2.7 petaFLOPS. The current fastest supercomputer, the IBM Roadrunner, has a processing rate of 1.026 petaFLOPS.

It works by harnessing the unused power of your computer and using it to process parts of the research projects. Most personal computers today are way overpowered for stuff like reading email and using office tools like Word and Excel. Most of the time you use less than 5-10% of your computers potential and what better way to spend the rest of the 90% of your computer power than to help finding a cure to cancer or intelligent life in outer space?

It started out as a client for the well known SETI@HOME project that’s been looking for intelligent life outside Earth for more than 10 years now. Now the BOINC client offer a large variety of projects, here’s a few of them:

• SETI@HOME
  “SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.”
• World Community Grid
  “Why not donate your unused computer time to World Community Grid and the FightAIDS@Home project to find better treatments for AIDS?”
• LHC@HOME
  “LHC@home is a volunteer computing program which enables you to contribute idle time on your computer to help physicists develop and exploit particle accelerators, such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”
• Rosetta@home
  “Rosetta@home needs your help to determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins in research that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases. By running the Rosetta program on your computer while you don’t need it you will help us speed up and extend our research in ways we couldn’t possibly attempt without your help. You will also be helping our efforts at designing new proteins to fight diseases such as HIV, Malaria, Cancer, and Alzheimer’s”
• Superlink@Technion
  “Superlink@Technion helps geneticists all over the world find disease-provoking genes causing some types of diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure), cancer, schizophrenia and many others”
• Climateprediction.net
  “Climateprediction.net is a distributed computing project to produce predictions of the Earth’s climate up to 2080 and to test the accuracy of climate models. Climate change, and our response to it, are issues of global importance, affecting food production, water resources, ecosystems, energy demand, insurance costs and much else. Current research suggests that the Earth will probably warm over the coming century; Climateprediction.net should, for the first time, tell us what is most likely to happen.”

I highly recommend that you spend your unused computer power participating in one or more of the great research projects. It’s fairly easy to get started and there’s a client for almost all platforms including Windows, Linux and Mac. You just need to download the BOINC client, create a profile and join one of the projects. You can get the client here and see the list of projects here.

If you like numbers and graphs there’s a cool site with all kinds of stats about BOINC right here.