The Power of Shared Computing
Millions of volunteers donate their idle computing power to humanity's greatest scientific challenges — from cancer to the cosmos.
What is Volunteer Computing?
Donate Idle Power
Your computer sits idle most of the day. Volunteer computing puts that wasted potential to work for science.
Build a Supercomputer
Together, millions of ordinary computers form a virtual supercomputer rivaling the world's most powerful machines.
Make Real Discoveries
Volunteer computing has contributed to Nobel Prize-winning research, discovered new pulsars, and accelerated drug development.
Anyone Can Join
No special hardware, no expertise, no cost. Install the software, pick a project, and start contributing today.
Volunteer Computing and the Nobel Prizes
Volunteer computing isn't awarded Nobel Prizes — but the research and methods it supports keep showing up in them. A few of the connections:
2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Awarded to David Baker for computational protein design, and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for AlphaFold's structure prediction. Baker's long-running Rosetta software — the same codebase that powers Rosetta@home — is part of the lineage the prize recognizes.
2017 Nobel Prize in Physics
Awarded to Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish, and Kip Thorne for LIGO's detection of gravitational waves. Einstein@Home analyzes the same LIGO data with related signal-processing methods, searching for continuous gravitational waves from spinning neutron stars.
2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Awarded to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt, and Arieh Warshel for multiscale models of complex chemical systems. The molecular-dynamics techniques the prize recognized are built on today by volunteer-computing projects like Folding@home and GPUGRID.
Featured Projects
BOINC
Platform / Infrastructure
Platform — the infrastructure many other projects run on.
The open-source middleware platform powering most volunteer computing projects worldwide. The gateway for volunteers to contribute to science.
Folding@home
Biology & Medicine
Simulates protein folding to understand diseases and develop new therapies. Became the world's most powerful computing system during COVID-19.
Einstein@Home
Physics & Astronomy
Searches for gravitational waves and new pulsars using data from LIGO, Fermi, and radio telescopes. One of the most scientifically productive volunteer computing projects.
Rosetta@home
Biology & Medicine
Predicts and designs protein structures to fight diseases. Directly connected to the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry through David Baker's lab.
LHC@home
Physics & Astronomy
Simulates particle beam dynamics and physics events for CERN's Large Hadron Collider — the machine that discovered the Higgs boson.
climateprediction.net
Climate & Earth Science
The world's largest climate modeling experiment, running massive ensembles of simulations to quantify the uncertainty in climate change predictions.
Gerasim@Home
Mathematics
Russian research project in discrete mathematics — testing heuristic methods for parallel-algorithm design and enumerating combinatorial objects like diagonal Latin squares.
The Ramanujan Machine
Mathematics
An algorithmic mathematician that searches for new continued-fraction formulas for fundamental constants like π, e, and Catalan's constant — inspired by Ramanujan's famously intuitive formula-discovery.
Ready to Make a Difference?
Join millions of volunteers worldwide. Your idle computer can help cure diseases, discover pulsars, and advance human knowledge.