This is definigely real, and they are legitimate. The research is also suported by NIH or NSF I believe. It has been a while since i looked at their website.

It is basic research (infectious diseases and cancer)... do not expect a drug from this soon.

basically what it boils down to is this. They are running molecular dynamics programs to fond out how proteins fold/unfold and interact with each other. This is an extrmely complex problem. To give you an idea, if you run a 30ns (nanosecond!!) calculation on a cluster say (16-32 CPU) runing in parallel then this takes 2 weeks or longer. One way to overcome this is to use computers that are not doing anything.... like to one you use for typing and internet. It is an attractive idea to use resources that are avalable and presumably running and using energy anyway.

I am letting them use my home computer but not the laptop because that on is on/sleep/on/sleep all the time which is useless for them.

Markus