What is the name of the process where thousands of home PCs do calculations together

Factual Questions
1

I was reading this article

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=31&art_id=qw1139934960134E516

Where the university wants personal PCs to devote some CPU power to doing calculations for climate change models. I have also seen experiments like these for SETI and for cancer research. Is there a name for this when a university tries to get thousands of people to volunteer their screen saver CPU power to do research?

2

It is usually called distributed computing.

3

Or grid computing, although sometimes that term refers to slightly different things.

4

There are several of them out there.

SETI@Home

Folding

5

The SDMB has a team and you should join it. We need more members.

Click here to download the UD agent software.. Follow their directions on that page to install it, then click here to join the SDMB team. The agent runs in the background and is quite unnoticeable.