The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a distributed computinginfrastructure intended to be useful to fields beyond SETI. It is being developed by a team based at the University of California, Berkeley led by the project director of SETI@home, David Anderson.
The success of SETI@home—which after its launch in 1999 quickly became the most powerful computingnetwork ever assembled—made it clear that distributed computing could be used for many other computing-intensive scientific projects. The intent of BOINC is to make it possible for researchers in areas as diverse as molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics to tap into the enormous but under-utilized calculating power of personal computers world-wide. In essence BOINC is software that can use the unused CPU cycles on a computer, to analyse scientific data—what you don't use of your computer, it uses.
One such example, is the BOINC platform which is a host for a number of distributedcomputing projects recorded on April 17th 2006 processing power of over 418.6 TFLOPS through 1 Million plus computers on the network [10].
On April 17th 2006 BOINC's largest project SETI@home has a reported processing power of 250.1 TFLOPS through 900,000+ computers [11].
On May 16, 2005, the distributedcomputing project Folding@home reported a processing power of 195 TFLOPS on their CPU statistics page.
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