You've likely heard about Distributed Computing, or at least some of the well-known projects like SETI@Home that got a lot of publicity in the early days of the Internet.

Distributed Computing has come a long way since then. Currently, there are dozens of projects that use Distributed Computing, and many of them solve some very important problems, like finding a cure for diseases like AIDS and Cancer, solving complex physics and mathematics problems, or trying to understand climate change.

Most projects use the BOINC platform. Rather than choose a single project, you can download a single program, then choose to help as many projects as you are interested in.

Running Distributed Computing software on your computer takes advantage of unused resources (CPU, RAM and disk space) to benefit the world at large. It takes just a few minutes to install and start making a small but significant contribution to humanity.