"You can do your part to help tackle such global issues as disease control and climate prediction simply by volunteering your computer's resources to solve complex computational problems. The concept, known as volunteer computing, benefits universities and research institutions around the world, who conduct projects that often have humanitarian goals, such as predicting and controlling the spread of malaria in Africa.
"To get involved, you download and install client software, which periodically downloads tasks for your computer to process using otherwise idle CPU cycles, memory, and disk space..."
