If you want to help with important research in medicine, space, or climate studies, BOINC can make it easy. It’s a program that uses your computer’s downtime to do small parts of big calculations for scientists around the world.

First off, the app offers two installers, one with VirtualBox and one without. If you choose the latter, you can still contribute, but only with simpler projects that don’t need a lot of computing power and extra setup.

The idea behind the application is to provide a way for you to participate in a wide range of scientific research projects by simply selecting one that aligns with your interests. And here you have plenty to choose from, covering areas from astronomy to climate prediction. Each project has its own goal, such as missions to derive asteroid shapes and spins, helping us understand the asteroid population.

You can pause or suspend the GPU mid-project if you need to use your computer for other urgent tasks. Don’t worry, the project is not affected and the app resumes processing later without losing the progress. You can find this in the Activity menu along with other options that allow the app to use the GPU right away or to only use it when it matches your preferred configurations, like when the PC is in idle mode.

Since BOINC connects to research projects, it does download and run tasks from those projects on your computer. You can't directly control the exact files it downloads because they are needed for the computations.

On the other hand, you can choose which projects you join, so choose the ones from institutions and research centers you trust. Moreover, if you opted for the installer with VirtualBox, the extra programs would get to run in an isolated environment.