I was cruising the internet and found this pretty interesting. Its kinda like the Seti@home but uses your extra CPU power to help find cures for diseases and research cures. Its called Folding@home and you download it and it helps the processing power of the computers at stanford.

http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/

Heres the information i got off of a forum
Hey, Folks;

We have a DevFolding team that participates in the Stanford Folding@Home projects. Basically it lets your PC's spare cycles be used to assist them in research for cures for cancer and a plethora (get out your dictionaries!) of other diseases. That's the good thing. The cool thing is it let's us run the hell out of our high performance PCs! We compete against each other and other sites to see who can fold the most Work Units (WU's). Believe it or not, it's hella fun so come join us!

Joining is easy. Simply go to the Folding@Home home page and download the version best suited for your system. We recommend using the top one on the list if you're using any version of Windows.

Once it's installed simply enter your user name (any you want, but preferably the one you use here in the forums), and then enter 12912 as your team number. You can use the same User Name and Team Number on as many boxes as you want, there's no limit. The more boxes, the more WU's you complete!

It will automatically download a work unit and begin folding. The goal is to fold as many as possible. A WU will take anywhere from 6hrs to 30hrs to complete depending on the WU size and your system. Then you can sit back and check out the stats to see where you and your bad ass box fall on the list of Junkies folding! (While, of course, at the same time helping out a VERY worthwhile cause.)


Here's some helpful links:

(Note: The stats update every several hours, so once you complete a WU chill for a bit then check em out.)

DevFolding Team Page: http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/...e&teamnum=12912

DevFolding Fast Stats (Real Time): http://vspx27.stanford.edu/teamstats/team12912.html

Standford's Folding Home Page: http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/

Program Downloads Page: http://www.stanford.edu/group/pande...g/download.html

I used to be a SETI addict, but just have my two slower machines running that now. On my main box I run BOINC, which is a GUI client that runs seperate processes and shares CPU usage. I am currently running a climateprediction.net and the LHC@home projects. I haven't yet converted my SETI account to BOINC.

For more information about BOINC and the computing projects they are involved with check out http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

i used to run about 45 machines with Folding...

then i got sick and tired of it, about 16 of those were in my computer room at home.. electric bill was high, but heating bill was lower.. but summer came around so i stopped..
i've been doing it for last hmm.. 3 years..

before that i was doing SETI, since about 1998, when there was only few people on there i was in top 100 in the world.. but then the companies started joining and having few thousand Pc's..

so yeah.. i got sick and tired of doing it.. when i stoped with Seti i think i had over 26 years of cpu power...

-E