The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is an open source middleware system for volunteer and grid computing. It was originally developed to support the SETI@home project 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 has been developed by a team based at the Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) at the University of California, Berkeley led by David Anderson, who also leads SETI@home. As a high performance distributed computing platform, BOINC has about 540,130 active computers (hosts) worldwide processing on average 6.642 petaFLOPS as of October 2012. 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, Mac OS X and various Unix-like systems including GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. BOINC is free software which is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
Read more about Berkeley Open Infrastructure For Network Computing: History, Design and Structure, BOINC Projects
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