a few years ago I discovered a great project called the world community grid. The project is a distributed computing project that uses your free cpu cycles to help solve some of our major problems.

Distributed computing is basically the breaking up of a task to run on multiple computers. So instead of needing an expensive teraflop server to analyze something for years, it can be run on thousands of slower computers but when combined do a massive amount of calculations.

Two projects have already been completed. The first project was analyzing differnt smallpox cure candidates. The second project was analyzing human proteome folding to further understand human proteins (not soo exciting but more knowledge is always better) and did the equivalent of 26,645 YEARS of processing (it took only 1.5 actuall years to acheive this).

Currently there are several running in parallel including fighting cancer, AIDS drug research, and human proteome folding 2. The software works quite well and I have not noticed any impact on performance (the process runs at low priority) of my system for the two years I have been running it.

They even made it a little fun to run it. Based on how many results you return you get awarded points and fit into a global ranging system. You can also create and join teams and compete against others. I am currently a part of team Alberta which has very few members but fun nonetheless. The other thing I really liked is that I can have multiple computers running under one user account and contributing stats.

So go download it and contribute to a good cause by doing nothing other than donating unused CPU cycles.