The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a software platform for distributed computing: several initiatives of various scientific disciplines all compete for the idle time of desktop computers. The developers' web site at the University of Berkeley serves as a common portal to the otherwise independently run projects.

Regular users (righteously) often find it an unbearable nuisance to care for the configuration of BOINC for the OpenCL-savvy AMD/ATI graphics cards. This package adds a series of dependencies from the non-free section to the regular boinc package. This also meant this binary package to be redistributed in the contrib section of Debian.