Want to help search for aliens and fight diseases right from your home computer?

A cornucopia of "volunteer computing" projects let you do that and more by donating some of the spare computational power on your desktop or laptop.

With these projects, rather than a giant, booked-up supercomputer crunching on a massive data set, thousands of regular ol' computers tackle a scientific problem that is broken up into piecemeal "jobs."

"Volunteer computing doesn’t get a single job done any faster [than a supercomputer], but it gets a whole lot of jobs done faster in a given time," said David Anderson, a research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. "These projects encourage people to think more and learn more about science."

Anderson founded and leads a program called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) that powers most science-related volunteer computing projects, many of which carry an "@home" suffix.

Often called "citizen science," this form of distributed computing has continued to catch on since it debuted in 1999 with the alien-seeking SETI@home project, which Anderson still directs.

Now over five and a half million computers around the world have one or more of the nearly 70 BOINC-enabled projects running on them. This network boasts a combined computing power of about three petaflops, or three quadrillion "floating point operations" – a calculation, essentially – per second, for a performance that beats the world's fastest supercomputer, currently the Cray Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tenn.

To get your computer signed up to do some science, first download a free program from the websites for the projects of interest. These data-devouring applications work on Windows, Mac or Linux operating systems . The applications can run in the background while you use your computers or they can make good use of your machine's idle time.

BOINC automatically detects a computer's speed and memory to give it a job that will not gum up the works and detract from a user's experience, Anderson said.

Eventually, Anderson envisions tapping into all the extra processing power and memory on smartphones and tablet computers. So-called "virtual machine" programs that harmonize how computers handle jobs regardless of their make and model are also on BOINC's horizon, Anderson said.

Anderson hopes to involve both more scientists and computer owners in the effort. "There's a billion computers out there and that numbers' growing," he said. These machines, Anderson said, could provide the extra computational oomph needed to dramatically advance fields of science ranging from medicine to astrophysics.

Here is a look at eight of the most interesting, important or unusual volunteer science-related computing projects going on right now. (Stay tuned: TechNewsDaily will soon put together a list of "active" citizen science projects for personal computers that make scientific discovery an interactive, game-like experience .)

8 Cool Science Projects That Can Run Right on Your Home Computer