Back in 90s when personal computers became popular for the very first time, the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) project released a screensaver that could be installed on any ordinary PC for sharing the processing power of your computer with the SETI project. This network became very powerful and helped compute all the data that SETI scientists were analyzing.
Now there is another similar project called Folding@Home that also uses a similar approach for research in the medical field. Just like SETI’s software, it also runs on your PC when you are not using it and helps compute complex data sets for the University of Washington.
Folding@Home is available for multiple platforms – Windows, macOS, and many mainstream Linux distributions. After you have installed it on your system, it must be launched either in Anonymous mode or using a username and passkey. If you use username and passkey, then it will assign you points which is a way to encourage the users to share more and more of their system resources.
Folding@Home settings can be accessed through its web interface from where you can choose how much processing power you want to donate to the research (low, medium or full power), and when it should use your computer for computation (when idle or anytime).
The same can be managed from its notification area icon in Windows. You can right-click on its notification area icon and choose a power sharing mode or when to share the processing power. You can also access the web interface from this menu.
If you have a really powerful computer then you can share its processing power with some leading medical research institutes so that their research can be furthered. It is very kind and noble work and you do not have to do anything other than installing their software on your PC.
You can download Folding@Home software from https://foldingathome.org/.