Since seti@home started in may of 1999, Ephman has been involved with distributed computing.  This is the only type of charity Ephman knows to exist that is super high on participaction, and low on money giving (but money giving wouldn't hurt).  Crazy huh?  So Boinc is from University of California Berkley and is an open source piece of software.  Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing is basically about taking very complex calculations, cutting is up into peices, distributing the parts out to volunteers to calculate and returned to the researchers to be recompiled back as a solution.  Your computers CPU will be maxed out running your piece that's all.  It won't affect the normal operation of your computer so you won't slow down.  Right now all those computers out there volunteering their CPU power makes up one of the fasest "number crunchers" out there.  Boinc is sustaining 1.8  PFLOPS.  Pretty darn quick.  Put it this way.  The IBM Roadrunner BladeCenter QS22 Cluster max is 1.1 PFLOPS.  Hey how can a single computer compete against 567,539 volunteer computers? 

There are tons of different projects to join.  Mostly the projects come out of universities from around the world.  Researchers never can have enough computer power to run their math.  Some are for folding proteins to help cure Mad Cow to Alzheimer.  There's the space ones like the famous Seti@home (the largest project), that searches for aliens.  There's also the more serious space projects like Einstein@Home that you search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO gravitational wave detector.  The math problem ones like Rectilinear Crossing Number Project which try to solve "What is the least number of crossings a straight-edge drawing of the complete graph on top of a set of n points in the plane obtains?"  Or simple decoding an enigma machine code that hasn't been figured out yet. 

So each unit chunked you get points.  Larger units more points, smaller unit less points, get it?  Here's Ephman's current point status.  Click on it and go to Ephman's Stats Page and see the awesome graphs.

The moral of the story is even lazy people can donate something if all they have is a computer.  So be good and give away that extra CPU power while your computer is online.