Cloud Computing is a form of computation and storage that hides the complexity of hardware and software management from a user. Typically, Cloud computing services allow you to rent computing or storage services. These services charge on a pay-per-use basis (roughly, about 0.10 per CPU hour or per GB/month). Cloud computing services such as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) also allow one to tailor a computing environment through the use of virtual machines. In addition, Amazon offers a Simple Storage Service (S3) for enabling remote storage.

Hosting a BOINC server on a Cloud is useful because it's cheaper for small to medium projects to rent time on a Cloud versus paying for hardware, bandwidth, and electric power on one's own. It's also easier and faster to use an existing OS image with the BOINC server already installed than to compile and configure it on one's own.

The BOiNC team has created a custom virtual machine with a BOINC server installed and configured. This includes all server software prerequisites and the correct permissions and accounts already set up. All you need to do is to deploy this virtual machine image on the Cloud and your server should be up and running. The guide describes how to deploy this Amazon Machine Image (AMI) over Amazon's EC2 Cloud. This can be done in minutes. Testing this image deployment will cost you less then 0.50 USD so give it a try.

More information is available at http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/CloudServer