DEPRECATED
Use BoincOverview instead

= Why use BOINC? =

Use BOINC if you need lots of cheap computing power.
BOINC lets you access two classes of computing resources:

 * The desktop PCs owned by your organization ([DesktopGrid Desktop Grid computing]);
 * PCs volunteered by the general public ([VolunteerComputing Volunteer computing]).

== Cost comparison ==

Suppose you need a lot of computing power - say, 100 TeraFLOPS for 1 year.
Here are some ways you can get it:

 '''Use Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud: $175 Million'''  :: Based on $0.10 per node/hour.
 '''Build a cluster: $12.4 Million''' :: This includes power and air-conditioning infrastructure, network hardware, computing hardware, storage, electricity, and sysadmin personnel.
 '''Use BOINC: $125,000''' :: Based on the average throughput and budget of the 6 largest volunteer computing projects.

== What's the catch? ==

To get lots of computing power this way, you'll need to do some unusual things:

 * Publicize and promote your project, on the web and if possible in the media.
 * Devote some resources to managing and communicating with your volunteer community.
 * Get your applications to run on a wide range of computer types.

== What applications can BOINC handle? ==

BOINC works best with "bag of task" computations -
large sets of independent jobs - with modest memory and storage requirements.
Typical applications include:

 * Simulations of physical systems
 * Compute-intensive analysis of large data sets
 * Exploration of large search spaces (including genetic algorithm).

BOINC doesn't require you to rewrite your applications.
You can even use existing executables without source code.

== Organizational possibilities ==

If you're part of an organization such as a university,
you should consider the various organizational levels
at which BOINC can be used.
There is an overhead in creating and maintaining a BOINC project,
and it can be advantageous to amortize this overhead
across multiple scientists.
Some possibilities:
 Individual :: Some projects (Primegrid, chess960) are run by private individuals.
 Scientist :: Most current projects are run by individual scientists or research groups.
 Consortium :: Einstein@home is run by a multi-university research consortium (LIGO).
 Application-centered academic community :: Mindmodeling.org serves researchers from about 20 universities who all use the same application (the ACT-R cognitive modeling system).
 Research institute :: LHC@home servers multiple groups at CERN
 Umbrella organization :: IBM World Community Grid handles applications from ~8 different research groups.
 Campus-level project :: This would provide a [VirtualCampusSupercomputerCenter Virtual Campus Supercomputing Center].