Dude, I would be more than honored to answer any questions you have, so.. just fire away
This won't crash your computer unless you already have heating problems, which in case, you should get it fixed, and that's another story altogether which should be saved for another thread. I can help you with that too
Basically what we're doing is just downloading a small client, which every few days downloads a small 'workunit' from the Stanford Univ. servers and processes it. From what I understand, it tries to simulate how proteins 'fold' or assemble themselves into the building blocks of what we are pretty much made of. When these proteins mis'fold' they can turn into horrible diseases such as Alzheimers or cause cancer or a multitude of other disasters. By understanding the genetic makeup of the proteins, and how they fold, we can cure that.
First though, it requires a lot of grunt work to help understand it, and that's where this program comes in. It's like asking a math wiz the answer to a math test, but pretend you could ask him three billion questions (a lot more actually) and he would respond! We're those math whizzes right now, and those questions are what we get our computers to process. It's a lot faster than going one at a time, on one computer. That is similair to what we call Distributed Computing.
If anyone thinks I'm wrong, please feel free to correct me!