Choosing and joining projects

Many volunteer computing projects use BOINC. You can participate in multiple projects and decide how your resources (such as computer time and disk space) are divided among these projects.

Projects are independent; each maintains its own servers. The BOINC developers and the University of California have no control over the creation of BOINC-based projects, and in general do not endorse them. The BOINC web site and BOINC Manager Add Project tool list the official 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. Install and run the BOINC software.
2. In the BOINC manager's Simple view click Add Project or, in the manager's Advanced view, click Tools -> Attach to Project. The Attach to Project dialogue appears. Select "Attach to project".
3. Select a project from the list. To join a project not in the list, enter the URL of its web site.
4. Select "New user", and enter your email address and a password of your choosing.
5. BOINC will open a web page that allows you to set other account data, such as name, country, and preferences.

That's it!

Joining additional projects

To join additional projects:

1. Bring up the Attach to Project dialog as above.
2. Select a project from the list.
3. Select "New user", and enter your email address and a password. You don't have to use the same email address, but we recommend that you do.

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

Multiple computers under one account

You can run BOINC on several computers under one account. Create an account as above. Then, on each additional computer, download and install BOINC. Follow the above procedure to join projects, but select "Existing user", and enter the email address and password of your existing account.