Folding@ home is a distributed computing project sponsored by Stanford University, Stanford Medical School and is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. To quote from their website, the project "studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases." However, it is a computational intensive task. In order to harness additional computational power, software was developed that allows an ordinary personal computer to receive a distributed task and dedicate a portion of its unused processor capabilty to solving the task. The results are communicated automatically through a network connection.

This is a hugely important project for medical research and allows you to participate with your home computer. There are teams you can belong to all over the world, and both user and team statistics are regularly published. We belong to Maximum PC Magazine Team #11108. Our team aas of January 14, is currently ranked 5th out of 151,722 teams and Blackhawk Computer Services with three computers working on the project is ranked 871th on our team, and 48,065 out of 1,171,005 donators.

For more information visit their website    http://folding.stanford.edu