This is a really good thing to do, and there is also one called SETI@home which analyses signals from outer space......
Had SETI on a donated laptop for a while because it had Vista on it. It ran until i had the time to reformat & install XP. It's an HP-and it wazza beach trying to find/get/download all the drivers that XP did NOT have in it's inventory. Finally succeeded-clean XP, drivers, and was off and running on BOINC-worldcommunitygrid.org .
My opinion was simple: finding new planets and new (to us) members of the universe were a bit detached frm finding a cure for cancer/aids/muscular dystrophy/denque/etc. So i switched.
As of midnight (+/- an hour) i will have created 5cpuYEARS of results (5,250 of them) for these various world health prbs, including WCG's version of proteome folding.
Bye the bye, there are probably 2 dozen or more sites that use distributive computing, including such nonsense as beating the (boris) Spatski chess check mate, the next prime number (now in 16 digits), and other math oriented projects mainly proposed and operated by post-grad college students requiring massive number crunching for their thesis. BOINC-WCG was selected after reading up on at least a dozen of these sites for the security (your machines have to open their doors/firwalls once in a while to get rid of finished and get new data!.), ease of I/O, and a bit of competitiveness as Tom's team seems engrained with (Think they're in 20th place world wide....admirable! and congrats).
For the moment all my work demands are met by my fastest machine, but as a side line, i've been collecting old (donated) eMachines (466Mhz, 533Mhz, 633Mhz), and am trying to make them as (power) efficient as possible (each machine with hard drive draws ~ 100watts and with the 9th machine about to join the 'team', i'm staring at a kilowatt/hour to drive all these puppies. Since my efforts to make them boot and run off a Flash stick with Ubuntu(linux) that is provided by BOINC-WCG has summarily failed, i will do the next best best thing and run this lean/mean OpSys on the hard drive, and hope the throughput will be better than running XP (i think it will....Ubuntu set up with WCG pgms takes only 250meg...and all the machines have at least 256RAM, hence e'thing should work in RAM and limit hard drive access...maybe even shut down HD intermittently?).
Hope you decide to join an humanitarian cause and Happy New Year and Happy Crunching
JR