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I'm doing the same thing for SETI. They're looking for alien radio signals and they need lots of computers to crunch the data. No luck so far, unless you count the radio station my 19 year old daughter listens to.
basically what it it is, is that Stanford doesn't have a large enough to computer to run the program so they ask for help from the public by getting you to download and run small parts of the program for them. When your computer is done with it, it uploads your finished stuff to the Stanford computer and then downloads the next bit of work from them>