IBM's World Community Grid

IBM's World Community Grid (WCG) describes itself as follows:
World Community Grid's mission is to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. Our work is built on the belief that technological innovation combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism can change our world for the better. Our success depends on individuals - like you - collectively contributing their unused computer time to this not-for-profit endeavor.
  This is similar to the SETI@home and Folding@home projects -- a couple of the precursor distributed computing projects that rode the internet backbone to utilize home computer CPUs to benefit computation intensive initiatives. The difference here is that the goal of the WCG is to provide the infrastructure that public and not-for-profit organizations could tap into for humanitarian research. The catch for those organizations is that all results from their use of the WCG infrastructure must remain in the public domain, and be available to everyone.
  To participate in the WCG, you need to download and install an agent -- a 1.5MB download. Platforms currently supported are WinXP, W2K, WinME and Win98. If you'd like to donate CPU cycles from a dual-processor machine, you will need this little hack that takes advantage of two CPUs, as well as providing some additional features.
Once you've joined the WCG community, you can track your statistics, join teams and have your statistics contribute in a team effort, etc. Think of it as a little competition to see who's giving the most to help society. Current projects benefiting from the WCG infrastructure: the Protein Folding project -- looking for new cures for diseases such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, SARS and malaria.

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