Hi, I'm Squint and I wanted to tell you about a cool organization that uses cloud computing to crunch data on any number of various academic research from finding the largest Prime numbers to discovering messages from alien lifeforms.
The University of California - Berkeley runs BOINC, an open source software for volunteer computing. (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/) Scientists and educators can submit peer reviewed projects which are added to the BOINC network to allow tasks to run on volunteers computers. It is an incredibly safe piece of software that runs on just about any modern computer. If you don't feel safe about installing it or want more information, I will provide whatever I can.
The current statistics from the BOINC page are: Active: 295,796 volunteers, 9,341,095 computers.
24-hour average: 8.198 PetaFLOPS.
The project I am currently participating in is called PrimeGrid, it is used to compute and discover large prime numbers. Prime numbers are any number that can only be divided by one and itself. These are used heavily in encryption and for other computational purposes. If you're interested in participating in this project you need only go to www.PrimeGrid.com
Also, I created a group for anyone who wishes to participate in the PrimeGrid project, http://www.primegrid.com/team_display.php?teamid=8032
Basically a group just sets an affiliation so they can see the efforts a group of people have committed to. There are groups for most major universities all the way to non-profit and religious groups like our own.
If you have any questions or comments please ask.
