Fold the CPU cycles

A worthy project for using up all of those spare CPU cycles is Folding@Home Distributed Computing.

It works on a similar basis to the SETI project, providing a distributed client which downloads small chunks of data and processes them across 100,000s of PCs, using the spare cycles on the CPUs.

As they explain:

"Folding@Home is a distributed computing project which studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. We use novel computational methods and large scale distributed computing, to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than previously achieved. This has allowed us to simulate folding for the first time, and to now direct our approach to examine folding related disease."

Get on your cycles!