[Ameo]

Distributed computing is most useful for stuff that you can, well, distribute. A lot of BOINC projects do this by dividing work up into workunits. They send out a packet of data to crunch, the clients crunch it, and return the results.

Many of these workunits are optimization problems without a clear solution and rely on algorithms using randomness, stuff like protein folding and bitcoin mining are examples of this. The nice thing about those is that you can send them out to as many clients as you want and just pick the best answer.