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Choosing and joining projects

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David Anderson edited this page Apr 9, 2025 · 3 revisions

Many volunteer computing projects use BOINC. Projects are independent; each maintains its own servers. We (BOINC and the University of California) have no control over the creation of BOINC-based projects, and in general we do not endorse them. However, we distinguish two groups of projects:

  • "Vetted projects": projects that we've communicated with, and for which we believe that they're doing the kind of computing describe on their web site. The BOINC web site and BOINC Manager Add Project tool list the vetted projects.

  • "Science United projects": a subset of vetted projects that are doing what we view as science.

If you use Science United, you choose science areas rather than projects.

Otherwise, you choose projects. You can participate in multiple projects and decide how your resources (such as computer time and disk space) are divided among these projects.

When you participate in a project, you entrust that project with the health and security of your computer and the privacy of your data. In deciding whether to participate in a project, you should consider the following questions:

  • Do you trust the project to ensure that its applications won't damage your computer or cause security problems?
  • Do you trust the project to use proper security practices on their servers?
  • Does the project clearly describe its goals?
  • Who owns the results of the computation? If the results are valuable, will they be freely available to the public or will they belong to a for-profit business?

Joining a project

To participate in a BOINC project:

  1. Visit the project's web site and create an account.
  2. In the BOINC manager's Simple view click ''Add Project'' or, in the manager's Advanced view, click ''Tools -> Add Project''. The Choose a Project dialogue appears.
  3. Select a project from the list. To join a project not in the list, enter the URL of its web site.
  4. Select "Existing user", and enter your email address and a password of your account.

You can repeat this process to join additional projects. By default the projects get equal shares of your computing power. You can change this by adjusting project resource shares.

If you run BOINC on multiple computers, you can add the project (with the same account) on all of them.

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