Volunteer computing projects

SETI@home ("SETI at home") is a project of the Berkeley SETI Research Center to analyze radio signals with the aim of searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Until March 2020, it was run as an Internet-based public volunteer computing project that employed the BOINC software platform. It is hosted by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and is one of many activities undertaken as part of the worldwide SETI effort.

open source chess engine

Volunteer project using software to search for Mersenne prime numbers

BOINC based volunteer computing project to aid scientific research

Rosetta@home is a volunteer computing project researching protein structure prediction on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform, run by the Baker lab. Rosetta@home aims to predict protein–protein docking and design new proteins with the help of about fifty-five thousand active volunteered computers processing at over 487,946 gigaFLOPS on average as of September 19, 2020. Foldit, a Rosetta@home videogame, aims to reach these goals with a crowdsourcing approach. Though much of the project is oriented toward basic research to improve the accuracy and robustness o

Einstein@Home is a volunteer computing project that searches for signals from spinning neutron stars in data from gravitational-wave detectors, from large radio telescopes, and from a gamma-ray telescope. Neutron stars are detected by their pulsed radio and gamma-ray emission as radio and/or gamma-ray pulsars. They also might be observable as continuous gravitational wave sources if they are rapidly spinning and non-axisymmetrically deformed. The project was officially launched on 19 February 2005 as part of the American Physical Society's contribution to the World Year of Physics 2005 event.

LHC@home is a volunteer computing project researching particle physics that uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform. The project's computing power is utilized by physicists at CERN in support of the Large Hadron Collider and other experimental particle accelerators.

thumb|FightAIDS@Home screensaver

'climateprediction.net (CPDN') is a volunteer computing project to investigate and reduce uncertainties in climate modelling. It aims to do this by running hundreds of thousands of different models (a large climate ensemble) using the donated idle time of ordinary personal computers, thereby leading to a better understanding of how models are affected by small changes in the many parameters known to influence the global climate.

PrimeGrid is a volunteer computing project that searches for very large (up to world-record size) prime numbers whilst also aiming to solve long-standing mathematical conjectures. It uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform. PrimeGrid offers a number of subprojects for prime-number sieving and discovery. Some of these are available through the BOINC client, others through the PRPNet client. Some of the work is manual, i.e. it requires manually starting work units and uploading results. Different subprojects may run on different operating systems, and may hav

free and open-source chess engine

Distributed.net is a volunteer computing effort that is attempting to solve large scale problems using otherwise idle CPU or GPU time. It is governed by Distributed Computing Technologies, Incorporated (DCTI), a non-profit organization under U.S. tax code 501(c)(3).

MilkyWay@home is a volunteer computing project in the astrophysics category, running on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform. Using spare computing power from over 38,000 computers run by over 27,000 active volunteers , the MilkyWay@home project aims to generate accurate three-dimensional dynamic models of stellar streams in the immediate vicinity of the Milky Way. With SETI@home and Einstein@home, it is the third computing project of this type that has the investigation of phenomena in interstellar space as its primary purpose. Its secondary objective is to

BOINC based volunteer computing project

BOINC based volunteer computing project

ABC@Home was an educational and non-profit network computing project finding abc-triples related to the abc conjecture in number theory using the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) volunteer computing platform.

Prime95, also distributed as the command-line utility mprime for FreeBSD, Linux, and MacOS is a freeware application written by George Woltman. It is the official client of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a volunteer computing project dedicated to searching for Mersenne primes. It is also used in overclocking to test for system stability.

volunteer distributed computing project and screensaver

POEM@Home was a volunteer computing project hosted by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and running on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) software platform. It modeled protein folding using Anfinsen's dogma. POEM@Home was started in 2007 and, due to advances using GPUs that rendered the BOINC program redundant, concluded in October 2016. The POEM@home applications were proprietary.

Docking@Home was a volunteer computing project hosted by the University of Delaware and running on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) software platform. It models protein-ligand docking using the CHARMM program. Volunteer computing allows an extensive search of protein-ligand docking conformations and selection of near-native ligand conformations are achieved by using ligand based hierarchical clustering. The ultimate aim was the development of new pharmaceutical drugs.

orbit@home was a BOINC-based volunteer computing project of the Planetary Science Institute. It uses the "Orbit Reconstruction, Simulation and Analysis" framework to optimize the search strategies that are used to find near-Earth objects.

QMC@Home was a volunteer computing project for the BOINC client aimed at further developing and testing Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) for use in quantum chemistry. It is hosted by the University of Münster with participation by the Cavendish Laboratory. QMC@Home allows volunteers from around the world to donate idle computer cycles to help calculate molecular geometry using Diffusion Monte Carlo.

Predictor@home was a volunteer computing project that used BOINC software to predict protein structure from protein sequence in the context of the 6th biannual CASP, or Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction. A major goal of the project was the testing and evaluating of new algorithms to predict both known and unknown protein structures.

FreeHAL was a volunteer computing project to build a self-learning chatbot. This project is no longer active.

BOINC based World Community Grid volunteer computing subproject

Astropulse is a volunteer computing project to search for primordial black holes, pulsars, and extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). Volunteer resources are harnessed through the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform. In 1999, the Space Sciences Laboratory launched SETI@home, which relied on a network of desktop computers around the world to provide massively parallel computation. SETI@home utilizes recorded data from the Arecibo radio telescope and searches for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space, signifying the presence of extraterrestrial technology. It wa

AQUA@home was a volunteer computing project operated by D-Wave Systems that ran on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) software platform. It ceased functioning in August 2011. Its goal was to predict the performance of superconducting adiabatic quantum computers on a variety of problems arising in fields ranging from materials science to machine learning. It designed and analyzed quantum computing algorithms, using Quantum Monte Carlo techniques.

Spinhenge@home was a volunteer computing project on the BOINC platform, which performs extensive numerical simulations concerning the physical characteristics of magnetic molecules. It is a project of the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, in cooperation with the University of Osnabrück and Ames Laboratory.

BOINC-based volunteer computing project detecting earthquakes

Ibercivis was a volunteer computing platform which allows internet users to participate in scientific research by donating unused computer cycles to run scientific simulations and other tasks. The original project, which became operational in 2008, was a scientific collaboration between the Portuguese and Spanish governments, but it is open to the general public and scientific community, both within and beyond the Iberian Peninsula. The project's name is a portmanteau of Iberia and the Latin word , meaning 'citizen'.

GPUGRID is a volunteer computing project hosted by Pompeu Fabra University and running on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) software platform. It performs full-atom molecular biology simulations that are designed to run on Nvidia's CUDA-compatible graphics processing units.

BOINC based volunteer computing project for rendering videos

BOINC based volunteer computing project

DreamLab was a volunteer computing Android and iOS app launched in 2015 by Imperial College London and the Vodafone Foundation. It was discontinued on 2nd April 2025.

eOn was a volunteer computing project running on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform, which uses theoretical chemistry techniques to solve problems in condensed matter physics and materials science. It was a project of the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas.

μFluids@Home is a computer simulation of two-phase flow behavior in microgravity and microfluidics problems at Purdue University, using the Surface Evolver program.

Africa@home is a website that allow users to use their home computers to contribute for humanitarian causes at Africa. This project first went public on 13 July 2006. It partners with Swiss Tropical Institute, the University of Geneva, CERN, and ICVolunteers (ICV). It is sponsored by the Geneva International Academic Network (GIAN).