The magnetic confinement fusion could be a source of energy in the future in order to resolve some of the problems in our energy model, such as depletion of fossil fuels and CO2 emissions, forcing global heating. Scientists at the Research Center for Energy Environment and Technology (CIEMAT) and at the Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI) perform simulations of plasmas that will be produced in the ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor). The creation of fusion plasmas, aim of this project, recreates on Earth some of the phenomena that occur in stars.

• Docking: looking for anti-cancer drugs Docking is the modern method of a systematic search for new substances with therapeutic effects based on computer simulation. The Bioinformatics Unit of the Centro de Biología Molecular Severo Ochoa (CSIC-UAM) has been for several years developing a platform that allows automatically simulate interactions of proteins and small molecules. Its purpose is to find drugs to treat diseases of high incidence, such as cancer.

• Materials: simulation of magnetic systems Physicists from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Universidad de Extremadura and Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems analyzed by computer simulations like how the impurities (non-magnetic atoms) in magnetic materials modify the properties of their transition from one magnetic state to another non-magnetic. The knowledge of these transitions is important not only from a theoretical point of view but also in many areas of technology, such as hard disks in the magneto resistance, superconductivity, or new materials.

• Amiloide: searching for drugs against neurodegenerative amyloid diseases The AMILOIDE project refers to the computational search, amongst libraries of millions of compounds, for potential drugs to interfere with the formation of aggregates and amyloid fibers in neurodegenerative diseases. Currently, the main target diseases being studied are Familial Amyloid Polyneuropathy (FAP) and Alzheimer's disease (AD). This project is the responsibility of scientists of the Structural and Computational Biology Group at the Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology (CNC), University of Coimbra.

• Neurosim: an immersion in the molecular structure of memory Scientists at the Institute of Matter Structure, CSIC analyze the structural properties of amino acids and small peptides (sequences of a few tens of amino acids) that act in the brain and nervous system. They obtained by simulating the so-called energy landscape for each amino acid, a key step in reconstructing the three-dimensional structure of proteins from the amino acid sequence.

• Nanoluz: light at a nanoscale Knowing how light reacts at a nanometer scale is a scientific challenge with important implications for the construction of new materials, development of new computing and communication systems or improved solar panels. Scientists at the Institute of Optics Daza Valdés CSIC investigate the light behavior in metal nanoparticles that could simplify medical and biological analysis.

• Adsorption: Behaviour of confined fluids in limited spaces Researchers from the Instituto de Química-Física Rocasolano from CSIC study adsorption properties of the Pillared clays that have a great relevance for the industry as catalysers, materials to store gases and materials used in separation processes. This kind of clays is used in processes like biofuels production starting from vegetable fats, the storage of natural gas in room temperature or the storage of greenhouse gases produced in industries.

• Cuanticables: Quantic wires simulations Scientists of the University of Buenos Aires study in what degree the faults that contain the materials affect in the capacity that a quantum wire has to lead the current. For this purpose, they develop a theoretical model who simulates the quantum wire, the impurities and the electrodes to which the quantum wire connects. They study in this frame the behaviour of the current that is generated across the wire when an external voltage is applied to it and they try to understand the role of the impurities, since this ingredient always is present in the real materials.

• Sanidad: Improved diagnostics Ionizing radiation is used in health applications ranging from basic diagnostic tests in a modern hospital (in radiology, nuclear medicine, laboratory tests, ...) to treat cancer (by Radiotherapy, Brachytherapy, ...). This wide range of applications can use radioactive material (in the form of seeds or injectable material) or complex equipment that generates photon beams and electrons. Physicist from Andalucía use Monte Carlo simulation techniques to improve the knowledge, the applications and the efficiency (diagnostic and therapeutic) in the safety use of radiation in healthcare.

• IberNet: Let's research inside Ibercivis With this project we want to study and represent the structure of Ibercivis as a social network and, try to export this conclusions to other social networks for trying to predict mass social environment.

-Computing for Clean Water

The mission is to provide deeper insight on the molecular scale into the origins of the efficient flow of water through a novel class of filter materials. This insight will in turn guide future development of low-cost and more efficient water filters. It is estimated that 1.2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and 2.6 billion have little or no sanitation. Millions of people die annually - estimates are 3,900 children a day.

-The Clean Energy Project

The Clean Energy project is sponsored by the scientists of Harvard University's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.[55] The mission of the Clean Energy Project is to find new materials for the next generation of solar cells and later, energy storage devices. Researchers are employing molecular mechanics and electronic structure calculations to predict the optical and transport properties of molecules that could become the next generation of solar cell materials. By harnessing the computing power of the World Community Grid, researchers can calculate the electronic properties of tens of thousands of organic materials – many more than could ever be tested in a lab – and determine which candidates are most promising for developing affordable solar energy technology.

-Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy

World Community Grid and researchers supported by Decrypthon, a partnership between AFM (French Muscular Dystrophy Association), CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research), Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, and IBM are investigating protein-protein interactions for more than 2,200 proteins whose structures are known, with particular focus on those proteins that play a role in neuromuscular diseases. The database of information produced will help researchers design molecules to inhibit or enhance binding of particular macromolecules, hopefully leading to better treatments for muscular dystrophy and other neuromuscular diseases

-Help Fight Childhood Cancer

Help Fight Childhood Cancer project is sponsored by the scientists at Chiba Cancer Center Research Institute and Chiba University.[35] The mission of the Help Fight Childhood Cancer project is to find drugs that can disable three particular proteins associated with neuroblastoma, one of the most frequently occurring solid tumors in children. Identifying these drugs could potentially make the disease much more curable when combined with chemotherapy treatment

-Human Proteome Folding

Human Proteome Folding Phase 2 (HPF2) was the third project to run on World Community Grid. This project, following on from HPF1, focuses on human-secreted proteins, with special focus on biomarkers and the proteins on the surface of cells as well as Plasmodium, the organism that causes malaria. HPF2 generates higher-resolution protein models than HPF1. Though these higher-resolution models are more useful, they also require more processing power to generate.

-FightAIDS@Home

FightAIDS@Home was World Community Grid's second project and its first to target a single disease. Each individual computer processes one potential drug molecule and tests how well it would dock with HIV protease, acting as a protease inhibitor.[29] Scripps Research Institute published its first peer-reviewed scientific paper about the results of FightAIDS@Home on April 21, 2007.[30] This paper explains that the results up to that point will primarily be used to improve the efficiency of future FightAIDS@Home calculations

The idea of BURP is to use spare CPU cycles on participating computers around the world to render 3D images and animations submitted by the users of the BURP network - in other words to build a large shared render farm that can be freely used by those who also contribute computing power to it. The potential processing power of a system like this is enormous--theoretically the rendering speed would only be limited by available network bandwidth.

The fundamental goal of BURP is to give users access to computing power to render animations that would take an impossibly long time on a single computer. By dividing the work among hundreds of computers, an animation that takes possibly months to render in CPU time could be completed in only a few days. BURP hopes to make animations and images public as soon as they are finished so that all participants will be able to see the outcome.

Renderfarm.fi is and always will be a completely free and open platform for doing distributed rendering over the Internet. As well as enabling artists to share computing resources between each other, Renderfarm.fi gives us, the volunteers, the ability to help them in the creation of their art.

By using Renderfarm.fi, graphic artists and animators benefit from the ability to use higher image quality and higher resolution when rendering. Renderfarm.fi also enables and encourages everybody to participate in the rendering of stills and animations, regardless of whether they themselves are able to do 3D graphics. It takes only five minutes to volunteer. By dividing the work among hundreds of volunteer computers, an animation that takes months to render on single machine can be completed in a matter of days.

You can help out with some of these projects by donating your spare processor time to help a good cause. Simply put, your computer is more powerful than all the computers in the world combined from 30 years ago... You most definitely use less than 10% of your computer power while you're using it... think about when you're not and it's just sitting there downloading mp3s... Why not donate that spare processing power to cure cancer or muscular dystrophy? Most of these projects work on the 'BOINC' (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) platform. Download here

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a non-commercial middleware system for volunteer and grid computing. It was originally developed to support the SETI@home project before it became useful as a platform for other distributed applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics. The intent of BOINC is to make it possible for researchers to tap into the enormous processing power of personal computers around the world.