Many of you have heard of SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI has been trying to find signs of aliens in radio signals that are received here on earth. The task is sorting through the junk (man made signals, naturally occurring signals) to find signals that would have meaning. There is a project run by the University of California at Berkeley called SETI@home that will enable you to use your computer to analyze radio signals as part of a distributed computing effort.

Folding@home is a similar idea, using spare computing power of many, small home computers to tackle extremely large computing tasks. In the case of Folding@home, the task is molecular modeling and the goal is to prevent human disease. The program is being run by the Pande lab at Stanford University.

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