The last time I ran the BOINC engine was in 2007. Now I’ve started running it again. BOINC is a Berkeley application manager for distributed computing. To describe the process very shortly you take a big task, cut it to small chunks, send each client at the end this chunk to be processed by him.

Usually many science related or research in a given topic, produce huge amount of digital data. Yet, in order to process that in a reasonable time, you can use this type of computing.

When BOINC initially running boinc, you can choose from a variety of projects to run from health related application, to cosmological projects.

Now-a-days when the mobile was introduced, there have been some applications for mobile (that does the same process) released for the public (i.e., BBC article on the subject)

Thing is that since the last time I ran it,. they have now added a procedure where a Virtual Machine is attached to a given project you run on the system (in our case they used the open sourced Oracle Virtual Box) — enabling the tasks to be ran on a given light version of Linux machine…

Here is a fast summary of the path it takes (after all initialization of the software has been done):

BOINC download a chunk of data –>
a VM is being ran by BOINC –>
procedures are being processed under that VM –>
Results are sent to the server back

Which is really cool seeing and understanding that,.

You can configure the system to be ran while in idle mode, on a screen saver (which shows a related data plot of the given project).. for example, if you run a ‘Quake Identification Project’ it shows you the globes with the different variable which are processed on your machine.

If you got a machine and would like to contribute to this processing power.. check the links I’ve gave in this article. That way you would know you are truly assisting to science  and our globe space ship…