Screensaver projects

Cures for influenza Easing side-effects of chemotherapy Anti-cancer drugs Cracking encryption keys Nuclear waste storage Studying stock markets Searching for prime numbers Identifying alien intelligence

The screensaver simulation evaluates treatments so only the best are tried on real patients.

"It allows individuals to directly contribute to cancer research and may lead to important discoveries," said Steven Armentrout, chief executive of Parabon.

Next Parabon is planning to study ways of reducing the side-effects of chemotherapy.

Participants in the Popular Power project will be tackling influenza.

Its screensaver looks at how different drugs fare when combatting mutant strains of the influenza virus. Popular Power is planning to pay participants but has yet to say how much.

Delaware-based Distributed Science, via its Process Tree network, is planning to run computational projects that will pay participants to use their machines.

Waste cycles

Potential customers include film studios creating computer generated films. The detailed images seen in films such as Toy Story and Antz take a long time to generate.

Some of the most action-packed frames from Toy Story took a network of over 100 computers 20 hours to generate.

But letting your computer work while you are idle will not mean you can stop working. Distributed Science says payments will probably only be enough to cover monthly internet provider subscription fees.

Already 100,000 people have joined the Process Tree network.

"Our network has a processing power three times the capacity of Asci White, the world's most powerful supercomputer," said Jim Albea the founder of Distributed Science.

IBM's Asci White will use over 8,000 processors and be capable of performing 12 trillion calculations per second.

Currently, the Distributed Science network is doing the number crunching on a study of the best way to store nuclear waste. The screensaver simulation models how gamma radiation leaks from storage containers made from different materials.

The networks set up by Popular Power, Parabon and Distributed Science Entropia will act like huge dispersed computers.

Unlike Seti@home, participants will not simply download data, analyse it and send it back.

Instead, significant results, such as a weakness in a flu virus project, will be passed among participants. The companies hope this will speed up the whole research effort.