BOINC

BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) is a platform used for collaborative projects in which people allow their computers to run computation-intensive tasks in the background to help an ongoing process. SETI@Home is a major project which moved from its own "classic" platform to use BOINC instead, but there are a number of other projects also using this platform. Clients are available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and other systems.

Users install the platform client and select one or more projects to participate in via the platform. Each project has its own files that get installed in conjunction with BOINC, and its own set of rules, data structures, user accounts, leaderboards, and so on.

Data files
The location of the files can vary by platform. In Windows XP installations the usual directory is c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\BOINC. In Vista and Windows 7 it is c:\ProgramData\BOINC.

Many of the files are in XML format, or at least something similar to XML with an .xml extension, though not actually completely valid XML. There are a number of files directly in this directory, some global to BOINC and some specific to particular projects (they normally have a project identifier like setiathome.berkeley.edu corresponding to the domain name of the project as part of their filename, right before the extension). There are also some subdirectories. The slots directory tracks the different concurrent tasks running as part of your installation of BOINC; this will vary in number depending on the characteristics of your system (e.g., 4 for a quad-core system that can run one task per core, 8 for a more modern one that can handle two simultaneous tasks in each core, 1 for single-CPU systems). These are numbered from 0 up, with the number serving as the subdirectory name within slots. The contents of the files here are project-specific.

Another directory is named projects, and it contains subdirectories for the projects you are using (e.g., setiathome.berkeley.edu). Often the files in the slots directory will contain references to files in the projects directory, and the actual data (e.g., work units) is in the projects directory.

Links

 * BOINC site
 * SETI@Home site