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I just got a new computer that has far more processing power than I need 90% of the time that I'm using it. To what ought I to devote that power?

I know of SETI @ Home and Protein Folding. What others are there? Favourites? Recommendations?

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switch it off and save the earth ;) – Shakehar Dec 30 '11 at 9:18
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The thing about modern processors is that they actually "throttle down" when they are not being heavily used in order to conserve power. An idle processor that works at a maximum of 2.8GHz can underclock itself to 800MHz (or similar, YMMV) in order to save both heat and power.

What you are doing by using the "wasted" cpu cycles is just defeating the purpose of these power saving features.

Unless of course you actually want to contribute to scientific progress, in which case you should look at BOINC which is where a large number of distributed computing projects are based and all run from a single client applicaton (including SETI@home).

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