Folding@Home

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Stanford Uni has this project called Folding@Home. Its using computers round the world to study protein folding to aid research into things like cancer, parkinsons disease and more. The program uses spare CPU cycles on you computer to do some really complex molecule modelling

If you only use you pc for web browsing and its newish, your pc might only have work to do for 2% of the time its on! Folding@Home uses up these spare cycles to process work for Stanford.

The upshot of this is that faster CPU's fold faster and so the overclocking community got involved. Add on the fact that theres a great stats system in place and some pretty good teams, and things got really competitive. Hence the reason people end up running loads of rigs 24/7 just to fold.

The main thing to remember is that this will leave your CPU at 100% usage at all times - so ensure that you have good system cooling in place. Just download the client from the Folding@Home site and get on with it. Theres some more info on this site about configuring the client and some tools to help with running the client.