For those of you who aren’t familiar with BOINC it stands for “Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing”. And what it does is offer a platform for distributed computing. Basically different groups have huge amounts of data to go through, and don’t have the resources to process it. so they send it to BOINC, and BOINC sends your computer tiny parts of the data that will take your computer a couple hours or so to process, then your computer sends it back to BOINC. You get hundreds or thousands of computers all doing this and you accomplish what a supercomputer can. that’s the thought behind distributed computing, and the goal of BOINC. To offer supercomputing style results to organizations that need alot of data processed but don’t have the resources to do it.
To get started with BOINC you’ll first need to find some projects that your interested in and want to help out! There’s a full list Here, but some of my favorite projects are listed below:
So now you’ve picked your projects, If your running windows click Here to download the BOINC client. If your running ubuntu, install the boinc client by opening up a terminal and typing “sudo apt-get install boinc-client boinc-manager”. (note: that last command is why I’m composing this article, it was surprisingly hard to find)
Now that you’ve installed boinc just run the program and attack it to some projects. if you wanna be a badass about it though, i recommend using an account manager like BAM! Have fun using BOINC! if you have any install or operation questions feel free to post them in the comments!
My BOINC stats 
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I just downloaded Boinc last night but it doesn’t seem to be working…I got a message saying set your environmental variable browser to browser…but I dont have a clue where or how to do that…can you help?…also it sends for projects but indicates 0 were retreived or completed..dont know what I should see if it is working…or should that be patently obviously..after BOINC downloaded suddenly nothing…I thought another window would open and say what to do next but that was it…have been looking around the web for a walk through but some of the answers I have seen seem to be for programmers which I do not understand…keeping on keeping on