The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) software is a distributed computing infrastructure originally developed out of the SETI home project, but intended to be useful to fields beyond SETI.

BOINC is the information technology infrastructure for distributing work in the form of work units and downloading the distributed applications that process them.

BOINC does no useful scientific work itself. Scientific computations are run on user computers and results are analyzed after they are validated and transferred from BOINC into a scientific database.

Many different projects use BOINC, such as - BBC Climate Change Experiment, Folding@Home, Einstein@Home and many others. Projects are independent; each one operates its own servers and databases.

Participants can participate in multiple projects; they control which projects they participate in, and how their resources are divided among these projects. When a project is down or has no work, the resources of its participants are divided among other projects.

Projects do not rely on powerful supercomputers for its data processing; instead, the primary contributors to the projects are many thousands of personal computer users who have installed BOINC client program.

The client runs in the background, and makes use of the CPU when it is not busy.