BOINC itself is a managing programme that allows an individual's computer to donate its spare number-crunching power to research when it is idle. It is a volunteer computer project, and David Anderson described the idea of volunteer computing as a programme that "is designed to make it possible for people who own PCs to donate part of the power of their PC to a scientific research project."

David Anderson spoke about the importance of BOINC and other volunteer computing projects. "Essentially, every area of science has been revolutionized by computing, and the more computing power that they have, the more science they can do", David Anderson stated.

BOINC can be used on a variety of different research programmes, and David Anderson stated: "If you look around at the applications that people are running using BOINC, they pretty much span the gamut of computational science. There's a big cluster of applications in computational biology and bio-medicine, people doing protein-folding and protein-structure prediction", as well as applications such as climate prediction, gravitational wave detection and distributed seismography.

The cost of running BOINC is also a big help to scientists because where some number crunching devices cost in the hundreds of thousands and even in the millions of dollars, running 10 BOINC projects is estimated to cost only $2000.

David Anderson was introduced by Michela Taufer, a UD assistant professor in computer and information sciences, who has firsthand knowledge of BOINC, having run the first-ever BOINC project titled "Predictor at Home" in 2004.

"Michela was an adopter at the point where BOINC really had more bugs than features, but somehow she got things working", David Anderson joked.

David Anderson concluded his remarks by explaining that in order for volunteer computing projects like BOINC to grow, projects must be created at higher organisational levels, specifically, the university level.