Running Folding@Home

Update: development on this program has gone a little out of hand and I can no longer recommend it.  Configuration is difficult at best, the interface is junk, and there's not a simple, lightweight, low interference setting.  Despite my earlier recommendation, I now avoid this tool.

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This notice is something I post at the bottom of all my emails:

Folding@Home - program that runs completely in the background to help cure major diseases. Do something useful with your machine: http://folding.stanford.edu

Folding @ Home is a software that makes thousands of separate computers behave like one supercomputer. The idea is that they take millions of simulations that need to be done, cut them into parts, and send them over the internet for other folks' computers to run. There are lots of projects out there like this but Folding @ Home is solving major problems in biology that are behind many types of cancer, mad cow disease, and more. Further, this project is run by Stanford University and all results produced are fully open and not restricted to big, greedy drug companies.

Most people only use their computers for Word Processing and email ... computers even 15 years old can do basic tasks like that without any trouble. So we have these hyper-powered computers that are really only being used some 3% of the time, usually while playing video games or creating mp3s. Why not put all that spare processing power to some use?

Downsides:

1. The program uses up a small amount of memory that can slow down your computer IF you're running a lot of applications all at once - otherwise it stays completely and totally in the background.

2. It can heat up your apartment slightly, but that's really only a problem during these summer months. Also, older computers or machines with a lot of dust running at 100% all the time will get really hot and can (in rare cases) damage the hardware. So its important to either turn down the CPU usage percentage or make sure all fans are working and the interior of your computer is fairly dust-free.

NOTE: If you have an AMD 64-bit in your computer (including the Sempron series), your computer can run these simulations *considerably* faster than other computers (my tests have shown between 2 and 4x faster).

http://folding.stanford.edu