[4] Developed originally to support SETI@home,[5] it became the platform for many other applications in areas as diverse as medicine, molecular biology, mathematics, linguistics, climatology, environmental science, and astrophysics, among others.

[6] The purpose of BOINC is to enable researchers to utilize processing resources of personal computers and other devices around the world.

As a high-performance volunteer computing platform, BOINC brings together 34,236 active participants employing 136,341 active computers (hosts) worldwide, processing daily on average 20.164 PetaFLOPS as of 16 November 2021[update][7] (it would be the 21st largest processing capability in the world compared with an individual supercomputer).

[12] BOINC code runs on various operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, macOS, Android,[13] Linux, and FreeBSD.

[14] BOINC is free software released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

David P. Anderson has said that he chose its name because he wanted something that was not "imposing", but rather "light, catchy, and maybe - like 'Unix' - a little risqué", so he "played around with various acronyms and settled on 'BOINC'".

[19] While not affiliated with BOINC officially, there have been several independent projects that reward BOINC users for their participation, including Charity Engine (sweepstakes based on processing power with prizes funded by private entities who purchase computational time of CE users), Bitcoin Utopia (now defunct), and Gridcoin (a blockchain which mints coins based on processing power).

In 2008, BOINC's website announced that Nvidia had developed a language called CUDA that uses GPUs for scientific computing.

[20] BOINC consists of a server system and client software that communicate to process and distribute work units and return results.

As of September 2021, the most recent version of the mobile application can only be downloaded from the BOINC website or the F-Droid repository as the official Google Play store does not allow downloading and running executables not signed by the app developer and each BOINC project has their own executable files.