Install Boinc on CentOS 7

Boinc is a piece of software that allows to get involved into distributed computing in projects such as WorldCommunityGrid, Rosetta@Home or even LHC@Home. It’s both interesting and put your lazy computers to work.

There’s of course a package in the EPEL repository allowing us to install the software easily. Let’s install it !

yum install epel-release
yum install boinc-client

Now that this is done, there’s the tricky part. Right after you’ve created your account on the website of the project that you’d like to join, you have to get the account key. It’s usually in the settings section of your account. Once you have it, you don’t need anything else to start computing for the project.

systemctl start boinc-client
cd /var/lib/boinc                                           # this is the tricky part :)
boinccmd --project_attach url_of_project a1b2c3d4e5f6g7h8

You can check with top, but you should see new processus poping and using your CPU. You can adjust the settings in each project about how much CPU they can compute on.

Good way to warm up your room as the winter is approaching :)