thanks for the info, i guess i was wondering if all the computational power was being used for some purpose like the SETI project. It sounds like at least part of it is used for maintaining the bitcoin network itself.
To answer that question, none of the computing power is used towards anything but verifying transactions and - the real work here - solving hashes to generate more bitcoins.
There's plenty of discussion on what this cloud-supercomputer could be doing in addition to its current task. Problem is, the nature of mining introduces several limits on the types of computational problems miners try to crack.
