BOINC allows people to give a certain percentage of their computer’s resources to different causes, which the person selects. This saves these projects from having to buy a supercomputer, as small parts of what has to be processed are sent to thousands of computers which process them. This software is available for Windows, Linux and OS X.

About 25 projects utilise BOINC, ranging from projects which find prime numbers, the future of our planet’s climate, aliens (the famous SETI@Home project) and even proteins which could fight diseases like HIV.

After BOINC is installed, the user must associate themselves with the projects and create an account there. Each project with which a user registers records all of that user’s activities and places them in a league table for the amount they’ve processed. Users can associate multiple computers to an account and join groups, whose combined activities place them in a league.

BOINC allows users to choose the proportion of resources dedicated to certain projects and ensures more powerful computers get more credit than less powerful, slower ones.

Certain projects have attractive visualisations too, which depict the information being processed. SETI’s can be used as a screensaver, which shows which parts of the radio telescope’s data is being analysed.

Some problems with BOINC are its power consumption, which can deteriorate a laptop’s battery, and that it makes computers hotter and consequently noisier. The GUI is also quite confusing!