Radio astronomers are searching the sky for signals that may come from intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. They are recording data from the great Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. But there's a lot of data, over thirty gigabytes per day. And it takes a lot of processing to pull any hypothetical signals from the noise. However, custom-built supercomputers are expensive, and the researchers are on a budget.
Client programs are available for a wide range of computers.
We also need an Internet connection for the data. The Internet connection also makes downloading the client program more convenient. The client program is a screensaver and only calculates while your computer would otherwise be sitting idle. Then it processes the data, searching for signals. If your computer is powerful enough, you can set it to calculate all the time.