Folding@home is a distributive computing project headed by Stanford.
I’d heard about it a few years ago, but never really got around to installing it. I just now re-discovered it, and am surprised to learn that there isn’t much of a team going. I searched the team database and came up with one team: The Straight Dopers. Unfortunately, before I joined there was only one other team member, and s/he seems to be inactive since last year. So, any Dopers want to join up, and computer for the greater good?
Also, I should note, the main goal of Folding@Home is to study how proteins fold. Apparently protein misfolding is a common factor in many diseases (even some cancers!) and they hope that by studying what happens, they can better treat the diseases.
It runs in the background, using your spare CPU power, and shouldn’t slow your computer down at all. If you are worried about it slowing your computer down, then you can just have it set to run on screensaver mode.
I’ve been folding for quite a while now, my team is ranked #2. I’m ranked 324 of 5000 on the team. I used to be higher up but I lost some of my borged boxen.