Did you know that ordinary people like you and me help find a cure for cancer or vaccine against the human immunodeficiency virus or increase scientists understanding of many major disease? All it takes is a computer, Internet access and willingness ti donate our computer’s idle time to biomedical research. You read that right. Scientist in various universities in the United States need volunteers anywhere in the world willing to donate their computers’ idle time for a good cause. This practice is called “grid computing” or “distributed computing”. It involves breaking up what would otherwise be a huge, time-consuming task into smaller chunks to different people who would work on them. In this case, the chunks are being distributed to thousands of volunteered home computers worldwide.

They could also wait to use supercomputers sophisticated machines with the highest processing speed available but the waiting line for such computers is reportedly long.