BOINC:About

From BOINC

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is an open source middleware system for volunteer- and grid computing. Originally it was developed to be the SETI@home project re-done, re-thought into a generic framework that could have many uses, before it became useful as a platform for other distributed applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics. The intent of BOINC is to make it possible for researchers to tap into the enormous processing power of personal computers around the world.

BOINC is being developed by a team of main and volunteer developers, based at the Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) at the University of California, Berkeley led by David Anderson. As a high performance distributed computing platform, BOINC has about 450,600 active computers (hosts) worldwide processing on average 5.356 petaFLOPS as of July 2011. BOINC is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through awards SCI/0221529, SCI/0438443 and SCI/0721124.

The framework is supported by various operating systems, including Microsoft Windows and various Unix-like systems including Mac OS X, Linux and FreeBSD. BOINC is free software which is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).