Use the idle time on your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research.
If your group has moderate programming, web, sysadmin, and hardware resources, you can use BOINC to create a volunteer computing project. With a single Linux server you can get the computing power of thousands of CPUs. Organizations such as IBM World Community Grid may be able to host your project (please contact us for information).
Use BOINC to create a Virtual Campus Supercomputing Center.
Use BOINC for desktop Grid computing.
Like distributed.net but putting it to good use... Lets see if we could get a memestreams user grid going... Tom had some kinda of idea going around....