[SectioAurea]

This has actually been done. You can now do protein folding and SETI (and a bunch of GMO research) while mining. Gridcoin is working with the full cooperation of the UC Berkeley BOINC project and is compatible with your choice of dozens of research projects: http://gridcoin.us

[ansible]

That's an awesome idea. I looked into the implementation though... it uses the same software to mine litecoins, and you get a credit when running the BOINC program simultaneously. So I see that as easily abused, where you are running fake processing jobs instead.

Ideally, the BOINC processing would somehow be directly integrating into the mining itself. But again, I don't have any idea how that could actually be done. But it would be nice if that is possible.

[aaren]

But not for ASICs mining bitcoin, unless they have a BOINC implementation that somehow uses sha256 as its core.

[SectioAurea]

Correct.