Simulating and thus predicting performance of new technologies with computers will be the ultimate afterburner towards singularity. Be they quantum or not. Recent progress has been shown in:

  - Protein folding [1]
  - Neuroscience [2]
  - Battery technology [3]

All of these project have in common that they do (or potentially will) scale to contributors around the globe in near-realtime. It will simply save us from expensive real-world experiments. The frontier of computational crowd-science heralds truly exciting times.

PS: Berkeley has been a major force in that and from where many similar projects originated (c.f. BOINC project [4]).

[1] https://fold.it

[2] http://www.openworm.org

[3] http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2015/04/15/electrolyte-genome-coul...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_...