Malaria Grid Project

We are all aware of financial institutions using grid networks to provide massive amounts of compute power to run complex risk calculations and simulations  .... but here is an interesting way to be part of a grid project yourself: Africa-at-home runs projects to allow computers across the world to contribute to African humanitarian causes, the first of which is MalariaControl.net, an application that models the way malaria spreads in Africa and the potential impact that new anti-malarial drugs may have on the region. This is another example of "volunteer computing", the largest of which is the SETI project which hooks up computers across the internet to analyse the data of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. BOINC was the originator of many of these projects.