So I've been lurking here for a few weeks now. I understand that I will not make ROI, but I still kind of want to pick up a PI and some block erupters. Something I've been wondering is are there anything else these things can do? I'm a computational biologist, so I do a lot of high-throughput data analysis, and the idea of this hardware really interests me but I don't quite have the software/hardware background to know how these might be applied in other areas.

Edit: It would appear that the answer is no. That makes me sad, but maybe I just need to learn how to encode all my data in SHA256. Thanks for the response guys, and happy mining!