BOINC (
Wikipedia) is a program released by the University of California, Berkeley that serves as a central point for joining and managing various projects that use
distributed computing.
You may have heard of the original worldwide phenomenon known as
SETI@home (
Wikipedia), which uses the power of millions of personal computers which each analyze tiny chunks of signal data from radio telescopes for potential signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Whose computers? Yours! Put simply, it's a lot cheaper for a research organization to split the work up between millions of small computers (especially ones they don't have to pay for!) than it is to pony up the millions of dollars for their own supercomputer/computing cluster!
The typical home PC spends the vast majority of its time doing nothing. Today's powerful processors are barely taxed by surfing the web, working in a word processor, or even watching an HD video. SETI@home set out to out those unused clock cycles for something worthwhile and started a computing revolution.
Of course, searching for aliens is the most interesting (from a PR standpoint) and marketable use for this kind of distributed computing technology, but although SETI@home was the first to prove that massively distributed
grid computing was feasible, many other projects (with arguably more immediate importance and benefit for humanity) have sprung up since, including ones that predict protein folding (which has implications for treating and curing diseases), increase the accuracy of climate change models, detect gravitational waves of neutron stars, and many other valuable and worthwhile scientific pursuits. (You can see a list and descriptions
here.)
In order to help advance the frontiers of scientific research, all you need to do is
download the BOINC software, enter the URL of the project(s) you want to join (you can get the URL from the above-linked list of projects), and register your account (enter an email and password).
However, a little friendly competition never hurts—and it might even motivate some people to contribute a little more. So, BOINC projects usually publish statistics for both individual users and user-created teams. Teams can be made for anything: companies, organizations, fans of a particular TV show, or (what some of the most popular ones are) members of online communities!
I did some searching, and BOINC has only been mentioned a few times on FlyerTalk (
here,
here [and a few posts below that], and
here), and there appears to be no BOINC-wide FlyerTalk team (there is a FlyerTalk team affiliated with World Community Grid and Climateprediction.net, but not with any other BOINC projects, to the best of my knowledge; there is also a FlyerTalk team on the Folding@home project, which is similar but unrelated to BOINC). So, in order to make it easy to join the project of your choice and still be with your fellow frequent flyers, I've created a
BOINC-wide FlyerTalk team, which will exist for
any BOINC project (current or future).
To join the team, once you've set up your account with the project(s) of your choice, go to that project's website, log in to the "Your Account" section, look for the "Find a team" link, type in "FlyerTalk," click the result, and then click "Join this team." It's that simple! (I may get a script going in the future that allows you to join the FlyerTalk team with one click; if anyone has access to their own web server with PHP enabled and wants to help out, check out
this site for an idea.)
If you participate in a large number of projects, it can be easier to set up an account manager, such as the one at
http://bam.boincstats.com, and then join all of your projects to the FlyerTalk team at once. An account manager also allows you to remotely control your projects on many machines at once, which is useful if you have BOINC running on a desktop or two at home, at work, on your laptop, and perhaps surreptitiously installed on a friend's or relative's machine.
Also, if you have a compatible graphics card, joining a
GPU-enabled project is a great way to help boost our Team FlyerTalk position! I've been letting my GPU crunch on Collatz Conjecture (the only project that works with my particular ATI GPU), and it's been helping us out substantially.
Instructions for how to do this are in the link above, but the first key is to open your BOINC client, look at the Messages tab or window, scroll to the top, and look about 10-15 lines down for a mention of a compatible GPU. You should see either "ATI GPU," "NVIDIA GPU," or "No usable GPUs found." If you have a GPU, then attach to one of the projects listed in the above link and watch your recent average credit soar!
I'm making the link to this thread as the "URL of team web page," so if you have any questions, this is the place to ask it!
Happy processing!