At a time when the Internet puts an untold amount of information at anyone's fingertips, and automated scientific experiments churn out data faster than researchers can keep up with it, and communications networks can include billions of people, even the simplest computational tasks can become so enormous that they would overwhelm even a powerful supercomputer. But sometimes it's enough to know just a little bit about the solution to a monstrous calculation: biologists mining genomic data, for instance, might be interested in just a handful of genes...

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/targeted-results-0331.html