For a number of years I have supported grid computing initiatives such as BOINC and WorldCommunityGrid (WCG).  In so doing I have amassed a number of merit points from WCG in particular.

What is Grid Computing?

Grid computing is a general term used to describe the distribution of a large number of computation tasks amongst (typically) a large number of client machines.  Each machine typically carries out only a small part of the very large calculation.  However, in so doing, the user gains access to a vastly more powerful computational engine than he or she might otherwise have been able to afford.

Grid computing has been used for analysis of computational chemistry tasks such as looking at how certain drugs might interact with certain known molecular receptors on cancer cells.

Using the BOINC engine, grid computing systems such as WCG make use of 'spare' CPU, memory and GPU capacity in a user's (say) desktop machine to work on the grid tasks.  The user is unaware of the work taking place.  This is usually because the modern operating systems are very wasteful of computing power - the grid tasks fit in the spaces otherwise wasted in the CPU's agenda.

Machines dedicated.

I run the BOINC client on my laptop and desktop machines (Mac-OS and Window$) and also on a number of ARM based Raspberry pi computers.  There are fewer client tasks, currently, for the ARM CPUs than for INTEL based systems.

For the INTEL based systems I exclusively run WCG clients but since late 2022, when WCG has become erratic in its supply of work units for ARM based machines, I have added the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) and Universe clients to the ARM based machines.  The ARM machines are, as it happens, more available than the INTEL based machines because they run other 24/7 projects and are supported by a UPS.