Donating Computer Time to Help Research

I finished reading an Iris Johansen book today, called Storm Cycle.  It brought up a really interesting topic, one I had never heard of before.  I'm not all that tech savvy so I guess it's really not all that surprising, but it had to do with donating unused computer time from your personal computer or game consoles to help scientific projects 

In the book they have a supercomputer and they got people and organizations to donate their computer systems.  It doesn't take anything away from your computer, you just simply leave it on when you're not using it so that the larger system can use it's computing power to do research.  The more computers in the system, the more research that can be done. 

So the book is fiction, but this concept is a very real thing.  At the end of the book it tells you about a website (http://www.distributedcomputing.info/ ) and here you can find a list of projects and you can choose which one to donate your computer time.  The projects range anywhere from cancer and AIDS research to literacy, global warming, and saving the rainforests.

These are two other websites that give information on donating computing time.

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/about_us/viewAboutUs.do
http://www.amdusers.com/wiki/tiki-index.php

Depending on the project you choose you might have to download software on your computer so that it can use your computer when you aren't using it.  You can even keep track of how much your computer has contributed to the project and what discoveries were made by your computer.  Pretty neat stuff. 

I just wanted to put this information out there.  Maybe you've heard of donating computer time before, but I never have and it might just be worth looking into.  It's pretty amazing what we can do with technology these days, and something like this allows us all to help in some way.  We may not all be doctors, but maybe we helped them get to a cure or new discovery faster because of our help.