Hi Hasi2011, unfortunately, science quite often is similar to trying to find a needle in a haystack. A lot of digging has to take place to find (or even, in some cases not find) the gemstone. Each and every WU crunched, is that little step nearer either finding that gemstone, or confirming that there's no gemstone to find - and in either way, allowing the scientists to make decisions based on the findings. Indeed, quite often, the results of earlier experiments/WU's crunched, lead onto further experiments/WU's to crunch - as was the case with the Fight Aids project.

Needless to say, this sifting through WU's (whether a positive or negative result), is far, far quicker in a Distributed Computing (DC) environment (such as WCG are providing), than if the scientists tried to do all this work on a cluster of PC's in their labs. After all, how many times did Edison try to invent a lightbulb that would be long lasting and useful?, tens of thousands, each failure taking him that step nearer the solution that would work.

In order for a project to be released on WCG, there are several criteria laid down - one of which, is that all the results are in the Public Domain. Therefore, they're kept so that they could be used for some future research.

One example, is the CEP2 project, where they're creating a massive database of information that anyone can access - all brought about by the volunteers offering up their spare CPU cycles.