Possibly the best idea for the use of idle cpu time ever devised!
A scientific project with a relatively low chance of getting major funding getting off its behind and appealing to people who would be interested to donate stuff they don't use anyway!
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.