First SETI@home, now FightAIDS@home

I'm sure many of you, even the non-geek types, have heard about SETI@home. It was a little program or screen saver that ran in the background and sifted through all the billions of bytes of data collected by the Earth's larget radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico for Berkeley University's SETI (Search for Extraterestrial Intelligence) project.

Well I just came across a similar project called FightAIDS@home. Which is a project run by the Olson Laboratory that uses distributed computing to contribute your computer's idle resources to accelerate research into new drug therapies for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

There's a little bit of a process to go through and register and then have the program running. It comes in all flavors for Mac, Linux, and the dreaded Windows. If you're interested in letting your computer help process the data while you're not ripping your latest iTunes mix or compressing your new iMovie masterpiece, then drop on over to FightAIDS@home to register and download the program to get started.