It can be a bit confusing finding projects to crunch since there are so many. Some are defunct or have filled their purpose. Here's some that are reasonably active. This is a project of the /r/BOINC4Science subreddit and Lemmy communnity. Another good list to check is https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php which is a little more comprehensive in terms of hardware/software combinations.
If you plan on signing up for several projects or managing several machines, the BOINC Account Manager can make this much faster and quicker. It is a good idea to have a minimum of two projects in case one project runs out of work or is temporarily down. You can set your less preferred project to "0" weight/resource share so it will only be crunched if your primary project is out of work.
Tip: Highlight emoji, ctrl + c to copy, ctrl + f to search (ctrl + v to paste into searchbox)
🔓 - Publishes data openly and regularly. Note many projects publish papers detailing the results of their work, this icon means that they regularly publish the source materials as well/the results of the computation in an open fashion.
✒️ - Credits BOINC in their scientific papers or other publications
🏆 - Credits individual crunchers for discoveries, such as finding a new black hole or prime number
🎓 - Sponsored by major university or research institute.
Hardware Support: (don't have a graphics card or gaming machine? Don't know what a GPU is? Ignore this section!)
💚 - Supports NVIDIA GPU/graphics card (all projects should be assumed to support CPU unless otherwise stated)
❤️ - Support AMD GPU (all projects should be assumed to support CPU unless otherwise stated)
✖️ - Supports OS X (all projects should be assumed to support Windows & Linux unless otherwise stated)
💚🎓 GPUGrid - Full-atom molecular simulations of proteins. Requires GPU for computation.
️🔓✒️ SiDock@home Works on drug discovery with COVID-19 as its primary focus, developing open-source COVID-19 drugs.
🎓✖️🔓Denis@home - Work on modeling to help solve heart disease!
🎓✒️TN-Grid - The gene@home project is an implementation of the PC-IM algorithm, whose purpose is to expand Gene Regulatory Networks (GRN). Each network is a graph that specifies the causal relationships inside this set of genes, and helps in studying the gene expression phenomenon: the process through which the DNA is transcribed into RNA and the RNA translated into proteins.
🎓✖️ Rosetta@home - Protein structure prediction that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases. (often low on work). Warning: workunits require a lot of memory, many require virtualbox.
Umbrella projects focus on several different areas of science
💚🎓✖️ World Community Grid - Mostly focused on medical research, projects have included research on AIDS, Zika, COVID, and rainfall patterns. Run out of Krembil institute. By far the largest and longest-running BOINC project.
🔓✒️✖️Yoyo@home - Brings existing distributed computing projects to the BOINC world using the BOINC Wrapper technology. Mostly math but some biology as well.
🎓✖️ LHC@home - Process data from the large hadron collider/CERN.
🏆🎓💚❤️✖️🔓✒️ Asteroids@home - Asteroid research - it uses photometric measurements of asteroids observed by professional big all-sky surveys as well as 'backyard' astronomers. The data is processed using the lightcurve inversion method and a 3D shape model of an asteroid together with the rotation period and the direction of the spin axis are derived. Publishes a database of all findings
🔓🏆💚❤️✒️✖️ Einstein@home - Search for spinning neutron (pulsars) stars using data from the LIGO gravitational-wave detectors, the Arecibo radio telescope, and the Fermi gamma-ray satellite. All results published in an open database and credited to users.
🔓🎓💚❤️✖️✒️ Milkyway@home - Creation of a 3D map of the Milky Way galaxy using data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This project enables research in both astroinformatics and computer science.
🎓🔓 Universe@home - Search for astronomical objects and phenomenon including black holes.
🎓Gaia@home - Infrequent work, research on comets and other space phenomenon.
🏆💚❤️✖️✒️🔓 Amicable Numbers Independent research project that uses Internet-connected computers to find new amicable pairs. Currently searching the 10^20 range.
🎓🔓✖️ NFS@Home - Lattice sieving step in Number Field Sieve factorization of large integers. Many public key algorithms, including the RSA algorithm, rely on the fact that the publicly available modulus cannot be factored. If it is factored, the private key can be easily calculated.
🏆🎓💚❤️✖️🔓 Numberfields@home - Research in number theory. Number theorists can mine the data for interesting patterns to help them formulate conjectures about number fields.
🔓 ODLK1 - Building a database of canonical forms of diagonal Latin squares of the 10th order
🔓💚❤️ SRBase - Attempting to solve Sierpinski / Riesel Bases up to 1030.
🔓✖️PrimeGrid - Find new prime numbers!
Gerasim@home - research in discrete mathematics and logic control. Testing and comparison of heuristic methods for getting separations of parallel algorithms working in the CAD system for designing logic control systems
🔓✖️ Loda@home - LODA is an assembly language, a computational model, and a distributed tool for mining programs. You can use it to generate and search programs that compute integer sequences from the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences® (OEIS®). The goal of the project is to reverse engineer formulas and efficient algorithms for a wide range of non-trivial integer sequences.
🔓🎓Rakesearch - The enormous size of the diagonal Latin squares space makes it unfeasible to enumerate all its objects straightforwardly in reasonable time. So, in order to discover the structure of this space, sophisticated search methods are needed. In RakeSearch project, we implement an application that picks up separate pairs of mutually orthogonal DLSs, which allows to reconstruct full graphs of their orthogonality.
🔓✒️ Ramanujan machine - Discover new mathematical conjectures
🎓✖️Climateprediction.net - Predict climate patterns. Warning: huge workunits, may take a week to complete!
iThena - Make a map of the internet! Sporadic work, some CPU-intensive while other network intensive. Measurements project is network intensive, computation project uses CPU.
🎓💚❤️✒️ Folding@home - Protein folding/medical research.
DreamLab - Medical research on Android phones
Cosmology@home - Project admin seems to have disappeared, assume project is dead
BOINC@TACC - No work in years
Nanohub - No work in years
RNAworld - No work in a long time