Have You Heard Of Grid / Distributive Computing?

(Disclaimer: This is for At-Home/Not-at-Work or on Govt Systems).
I am not sure what it was, but back in May the former Space Systems geek awoke. My partner wanted me to get rid of a couple PCs laying around. We went through the house and storage and discovered we were still hanging onto an old Compaq Presario and 3 old laptops. Okay – I am a dork, not hoarder. I didn’t want to pitch old hard drives and lithium batteries.
Before I dumped them I thought about creating a mega in house network but realized WHY? There’s the Cloud now. I googled ideas of what to do with unharnessed computing power and found BOINC and a world of scientific distributive learning out there.
For those who don’t know what I am talking about distributive grid computing is a process where your computer ties into a network server (usually at an academic institution), receives work (data crunching to be completed), and completes the work while your PC’s processor (or graphics processor) isn’t busy. Once the work is completed it is uploaded to the server and the process is repeated. What this does is basically simulated a GIANT SUPERCOMPUTER/MAIN FRAME.
There are all kinds of projects out there (dozens from crunching simulation data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN Switzerland (LHC@Home), working on the behind-the-scenes math/data fighting Malaria (University College Dublin), to helping understand the map of brain neuropathways (Mindmodelling at University to Dayton), to listening for “ET” with SETI at the University of California Berkley.
I’ve tweaked the PCs (and Android devices) in our house to run a freeware program called BOINC in the background. BOINC manages your computers preferences and does the data crunching in the background. BOINC allows you to join teams and/or customize what you want your machine to focus on. I check on my machines via an account manager called “BOINCSTATS” every day or two. A couple of the projects such as SETI@Home and Mindmodelling have cool screen savers and I leave them on “low” just to remind myself that my machines are part of a network working on problems. (Plus I want to see when my PC “hears” ET LOLOL).
My machines are running an average of 12-15 watts per hour (26-25 watt/hr). So it’s not free. But I don’t mind spending some money for what I think is a worthy project!