BOINC is a free software developed by University of California, Berkeley. Anyone can
download it from the
site: http://boinc.
berkeley.edu/ . It was developed in order to help science by working on different tasks.
After downloading it, you can choose from several tasks, like
medicine, astronomy, physics, meteorology and others. The software will work on these tasks when you want: you can set the time, the amount of used CPU and used memory for the BOINC.
For every solved task you will get credits.
Although developed for SETI, nowadays you can do much more with it.
There are a lot of users, whose computers work as pieces of a supercomputer, helping science. The BOINC has a community, and you can join groups as well.
Hopefully soon it will get a great help for medical and other scientific advances.