First, welcome! It's good that you decided to use your computer to help out scientific questions of our time, ranging from finding extra-terrestials, to folding human genome sequences to find medical cures, and much more besides. Now, what is BOINC about? Many scientific projects require a lot of computational power. The classic solution for this is to have huge (and very expensive) supercomputers. However, it is much cheaper to divide the data into small blocks that more simple computers (like desktop pc's, laptops, etc) can handle. The idea is that a million simple computers can do the job of a few super computers. The (as far as I know) first project utilising this idea was the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestial Intelligence) project, which searches for alien civilisations by scanning the sky for artificial radio signals. Back in the 1990's the funding for the project was being slashed, so scientists had to look for innovative ways to process their vast amounts of data. SETI@Home was the result. BOINC is the next generation of this idea. BOINC is a platform on which many different projects can participate, ranging from cryptography and other mathematical problems, to protein and enzyme folding (medical research), to astronomy and much else. Se this page for a full lists of projects. BOINC only uses the idle time of a CPU or, more recently, your GPU (video card processor), meaning you shouldn't notice it being run at all as it only uses the resources you wouldn't be using anyway. How can you help? Our team is called The Communists and you can find our BOINC page here. You proceed to afew simple steps: 1. You choose a project 2. Download and install the BOINC client 3. Sign up to the project via the BOINC client The last step is a wizard you run in the BOINC client under project management -> add project or accountmanager. Once done with the wizard, your browser will be fired up and you'll be led to the project page of the project you just signed up for. On the first page you'll be asked where you live. On the second page you'll see a search field for signing up to a team. Search the communists, it'll usually be the first result in the search list. Click on the result and scroll down to the "join this team" link and click it. You should now be fully set up. Happy crunching!
