First off - Why the name change? Scotland's Seti was, as the more intelligent of you might have worked out, set up to help the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) project. This was in 1999 long before BOINC was ever conceived. The original SETI project has now migrated to BOINC which includes a myriad of other projects. We still support SETI in a big way but also now do 4 dozen other projects. With all due respect to our glorious past, we thought it was finally time that the inclusivity of our approach to Distributed Computing was reflected in our name. 

What is BOINC? "BOINC is a software platform for distributed computing using volunteered computer resources". In other words it lets you use your computer's spare processing power to be part of what is effectively a vast global supercomputer consisting of nearly a million people in over 200 countries donating over a million computers.

How does it work? You download the Boinc Manager Software. Then you sign up to & attach to 1 or more projects & that's it. Thereafter, until you stop, it your software will connect to base, download bits of work, process them , upload them, repeat ad infinitem & then Robert is your parent's male sibling.

Hold on. What spare processing power? Modern PCs are powerful beasts.  Unless you're playing some heavy duty games or doing some serious maths the chances are that for 99% of the time your CPU is just sitting there doing S.F.A. waiting for your next keystroke and being bitterly unfulfilled at how undemanding you are. It probably feels a bit like Marvin the Paranoid Android depressed at having brain the size of planet going to waste. You can cheer up your computer by giving it something useful to do in between satisfying your pathetically feeble demands by running Boinc.

Won't it slow down my PC? No, it works in the background giving priority to anything else you choose to do. Your PC will still leap to do your puny bidding as soon as your finger hits the keyboard or mouse button.

What sort of projects does Boinc include? All sorts. The biggest project is still SETI which processes data from radio telescopes to look for evidence of  far distant civilisations.

So what's in it for me? Just the satisfaction of contributing to worthwhile work that otherwise wouldn't get done or that would only get done by using other expensive resources. And there's the credits of course.

Credits- What they? For each work unit you do get so many points (officially called Cobblestones, although usually people just call them credits) which reflect the amount of processing your computer has done for it. Each project keeps track of what each user has done for it and there are various sites that will add them up across projects so that individuals or teams can compare their scores. There are about 950,000 Boinc Users & 45,000 teams. Most of us think it's good fun to compete with other users and teams 

Do I have to join a team? No, but it's more fun if you do.

If I join a team what happens to my credits? An important point is that joining or leaving a team never affects your individual statistics so you can join and leave as much as you want without affecting you own standing (although your team-mates might not appreciate your fickleness). For most projects the way it works is that if you earn any credits while a member of a particular team that teams account gets the same number of credits 

To Be Continued.

More information is available from or the Unofficial Boinc Wiki will give you more information than you could ever need.

If you have particular problems/questions you can post on the forum and we will try to help.