February 9th, 2012, 02:28 PM
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#4 (permalink)
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New Member
Join Date: Feb 2012
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I'm between the two of you... apparently I'm of the age that was into BOINC...
It's a program that allows you to participate in several distributed computing projects. Your spare processing power is used to help solve various computationally intensive projects. The original program (I think) was SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) where your spare processing power is used to process radio frequency data from various sources to try to find patterns (intelligence?).
Today BOINC is used to solve various things including math problems, medical problems, chemical problems, weather patterns...etc.
You don't get paid, you get some recognition if you help find something, you DO use more electricity and generate more heat since your processor is used more but it shouldn't slow your phone/computer down since it's typically (and by default) set up to only use your spare processing capacity. For phones, you only want to run it when plugged in.
The project is quite large (over 2 millions of participants internationally with about 7 million hosts), I've been involved for over 10 years now. It keeps track of all that you've contributed. It's pretty much free for users and it's nice to know that you're helping solve some of societies problems. Additionally, nerds like me like to brag about how many workloads our computers have done and are doing. It all adds up.
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