Welcome to The Scottish Boinc Team

Welcome to The Scottish Boinc Team (established in 1999 as Scotland's Seti), one of the oldest and most successful BOINC teams crunching today.

We crunch for all current BOINC projects and are always at the forefront of adding new projects that start up within BOINC. Our aim is to use our spare computing power to advance human knowledge while enjoying some friendly competition amongst ourselves and with other teams.If you want to be part of a lively, friendly team, please come join us, everyone is welcome.
The most important part of the site is our forum. Even if you're not a member of any of our teams we'd be delighted to have you visit.

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC, pronounced /bɔɪŋk/ - rhymes with "oink"), an open-source middleware system, supports volunteer and grid computing. Originally developed to support the SETI@home project, it became generalized as a platform for other distributed applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, linguistics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, environmental science, and astrophysics, among others. BOINC aims to enable researchers to tap into the enormous processing resources of multiple personal computers around the world.

BOINC development originated with a team based at the Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) at the University of California, Berkeley and led by David Anderson, who also leads SETI@home. As a high-performance distributed computing platform, BOINC brings together about 311,742 active participants and 834,343 active computers (hosts) worldwide processing on average 11.747 PetaFLOPS as of 24 March 2016.

In essence, BOINC is software that can use the unused CPU and GPU cycles on a computer to do scientific computing—what one individual does not use of his/her computer, BOINC uses. In late 2008, BOINC's official website announced that NVIDIA (a leading GPU manufacturer) had developed a system called CUDA that uses GPUs for scientific computing. With NVIDIA's assistance, some BOINC-based projects (e.g., SETI@home, MilkyWay@home) now have applications that run on NVIDIA GPUs using CUDA. Beginning in October 2009, BOINC added support for the ATI/AMD family of GPUs also. These applications run from 2× to 10× faster than the former CPU-only versions. In 7.x preview versions, GPU support (via OpenCL) was added for computers using Mac OS X with AMD Radeon graphic cards.

BOINC consists of a server system and client software that communicate with each other to distribute and process work units and return the results.

The BOINC Credit System is designed to avoid cheating by validating results before granting credit.

A credit management system helps to ensure that users are returning results which are both scientifically and statistically accurate.

Online distributed computing is almost entirely a volunteer endeavor. For this reason, projects are dependent on a complicated and variable mix of new users, long-term users, and retiring users.