Wikipedia
LHC@home is a distributed computing project for particle physics based on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform.
LHC@home consists of two applications: LHC@home Classic, SixTrack, which went live in September 2004 and is used to upgrade and maintain the particle accelerator Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and LHC@home 2.0, Test4Theory (now is Virtual LHC@home), which went live in August 2011 and is used to simulate high-energy particle collisions to provide a reference to test the measurements performed at the LHC.
The applications are run with the help of about fifteen thousand active volunteered computers processing at a combined more than 15.5 teraFLOPS on average as of June 2014. LHC@home uses idle computer processing resources from volunteers' computers to perform calculations on individual workunits, which are sent to a central project server upon completion. The project is cross-platform, and runs on a variety of hardware configurations. Virtual LHC@home uses VirtualBox, an x86 virtualization software package.