Hello, I've been running the Boinc client on my machines at home, in total 38 3 Ghz cores. Now this costs some money and consumes some energy which in turn comes from some source which causes whatever negative impact. Furthermore the extra amount financially could be donated to other causes such as doctors without borders. So this got me thinking about what actual practical applications have come from projects such as this and Folding@Home.

Looking at the papers which have been released from Folding@Home they are almost exclusively on the topic of running simulations on large scale distributed grids instead of on the humanitarian topics actually studied. This is causing me to lose faith in these types of projects, after all if they fail to produce any practical results we're more than likely looking at a net loss for humanity and not a net gain. Is anyone aware of anything practical that has come from any project such as this? I need to see some sort of practical result or I'm fairly certain I can't motivate running these types of grids.

Let me know if you know of a "success" story :)