All for a Cause You only use a fraction of your computer's processing power when you surf the Web or compose a letter or E-mail. When you step away, you're using none of it. About 550,000 are active volunteers, many using multiple computers. Researchers can test millions of drug combinations to fight AIDS or cancer, and learn how anomalies in protein formation cause diseases. The concept has been adapted by firms like Porivo Technologies Inc. and Envive Corp. to monitor network connections.
Web sites can tap their networks of Net users to test Web performance.
The clients are, by and large, small, well written, and automatically step down CPU consumption when you run something, like Word or a game. All these clients have to communicate with the master server at one point or the other, but they can handle data exchanges in minutes once you go online. These projects are open to the public, and getting involved is easy since the more people involved, the more horsepower can be brought to bear. All you have to do is to download the client and fill in a few blanks, such as your name and the E-mail address, and away you go. After that, you just leave the client running when you're not using the computer, rather than shutting the machine off.