BOINC Manager

Donate your idle computer time to science projects – that is the idea behind BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). Its original purpose was to support SETI@home, a project that searches for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence. Now it supports many other projects from various areas of science.

There’s a BOINC Client that runs in the background and handles all communications with the server. And there’s a BOINC Manager that acts as a “control panel” for BOINC. You can use the Manager to control the aforementioned Client and to choose the science projects you want to support.

Speaking about support, I have to mention that the BOINC framework is supported by multiple operating systems: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Android. I also have to mention that BOINC is free and open source software released under a GNU GPL. So if you’re a developer and you want to tinker with the source code, you can do just that.

A setup wizard will help you install BOINC on your Windows PC. The Quick Look video that accompanies this article presents the steps this setup wizard takes you through. Once the setup wizard is done with the installation process, it will ask to launch the BOINC Manager.

When you launch BOINC Manager, a prompt will show up and invite you to add a project or use an account manager. This prompt explains that there are over 30 BOINC-based projects to choose from, projects from many areas of science. You can volunteer for as many as you want.

BOINC Manager features two view modes for its interface: Simple and Advanced View. The Simple View, which is used by default and is designed for non-technical users, provides access to a simple set of controls. If you want to access more controls, if you want to see additional functionality on the interface, switch to Advanced View. The tabbed Advanced View interface lets you monitor the details of the tasks running on the client computer and the projects the client is participating in.

If you have problems figuring BOINC out, check out this Help webpage and this detailed User Manual.

Lend science a helping hand. Use BOINC to donate your computer’s idle time to science projects that help discover pulsars, study global warming, cure diseases, and so on. There are lots of projects you could support.