It would be interesting to explore the possibility of manufacturing inexpensive multi-CPU units that could also serve as resistance heaters for cold climates in winter, such as Minnesota. Clusters of CPU's like AMD's (!) could easily heat a home while providing huge amounts of cheap processing power for grid computing. Nothing cools a CPU quite like winter.

The point is that the same amount of energy is today being spent merely on heat; why not put that energy to double use by exploiting it for computations? Obviously this would require a lot of government involvement, as it would be the digital equivalent of constructing a superhighway system. On the other hand, the paybacks would be quick, and enormous, as enormous computing power would be available for solving the super-complex problems of biological science. Combined with WiFi, such a system would also make it easy to package portable processing, where all but a few percent of computations would be performed by the "heaters."

Even a partial implementation of such a system would bring huge benefits to sciences that are amenable to computer power.