Remember SETI@Home? The Institute for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence was the custodian of gigabytes of radio telescope data (a lot back in 1999) collected from observatories around the world, and programmers hit upon a novel solution.
Rather than one huge central computer crunching all the data looking for signals from alien civilizations, they created an application users could download to their own system.
It was essentially a screensaver, kicking in after a few minutes of inactivity, and it downloaded a small chunk of information to analyze. The result was then sent back to its UC Berkeley home base, giving you a cool visualization of the data synthesis process.
Click here to read the rest of this story.