Volunteer your PC through the World Community Grid

The mission of the World Community Grid "is to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity". How? By pooling together the unused (read: wasted) processing power of PCs around the globe to tackle quantitative research problems associated with humanitarian research.

About the org
(from their website)

"World Community Grid is making technology available only to public and not-for-profit organizations to use in humanitarian research that might otherwise not be completed due to the high cost of the computer infrastructure required in the absence of a public grid. As part of our commitment to advancing human welfare, all results will be in the public domain and made public to the global research community."

How does it work?
(from their website)

"When idle, your computer will request data on a specific project from World Community Grid's server. It will then perform computations on this data, send the results back to the server, and ask the server for a new piece of work. Each computation that your computer performs provides scientists with critical information that accelerates the pace of research!"

It's sheer genius. A win-win scenario that's almost too easy.

To learn more about the project and to download the software, visit http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/

An alternate site with different projects to support: http://www.grid.org/
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Time commitment? One download that takes less than 1 minute
Cost? $0
Impact? Right now, you can choose between the FightAIDS@Home Project and the Human Proteome Project (or both).