Would Folding@Home Pay for Computing Power?

[PacMan]

If donors received monetary compensation, surely the number of donors would grow. But I'm curious if Folding@Home or others in need of vast computing power would be willing to pay users? Hypothetically, if there were payment, maybe the network would become very vast and the immense computing power available might be useful to certain users? Thoughts?

[Joe_H]

If you are looking for an answer from PG, this type of question is best asked on the official reddit page - https://www.reddit.com/r/foldingathome/.

However based on my experience, the answer is no. There just is not that kind of money available in research budgets to pay persons processing WU's for distributed computing projects. Most research grants do not allow that kind of use of the money given to researchers and their schools.

[7im]

There are several crypto currency projects giving out credits for folding. Not sure what the pay rate is, but there are a good number of people on those teams.

[PacMan]

Ah OK, I see, thanks; that makes sense.

[foldy]

There is a project called curecoin which gives you a little money for folding but it is maybe lower than what you pay for the electricity.

I think the idea of getting paid for folding would work if the government or a company would have some dollars to spend for folding, excluding uses like pay more developers or advertising. Then the decision is to make 1) pay for cloud computing or computer center or 2) pay for folding at home.

If option 2) is cheaper and price is high enough to attract the power users with their GPUs or maybe many people with fast smartphones then this is were folding@home gets really powerful.

The idea is the users already have the hardware they just need to run the folding software and pay the electricity. So for the users to make profit, you need to pay their price for electricity plus the profit to the users. e.g. a PC with 500 Watt will cost 0,25$/kwh * 0,5kw * 24h = 3$ a day electricity producing 5 TFlops on a fast GPU. Plus 1$ profit for the user this is 4 dollars a day for 5 Tflops to pay. The users living in regions with lower electricity price will profit more others less.

In comparison an amazon cloud g2.2xlarge using GRID K520 has 2.5 Tflops and costs 0.65$ per hour. To match my PC example this is 1.30$ per hour for 5 Tflops and 31$ per day. In this case the folding PC wins with price 4$ per day. If we increase the profit for the user from 1$ to 10$ per day and add electricity cost 3$ this is 13$ to pay in total - then PC still wins.

[PacMan]

Would you show how you get to that pricing from this AWS pricing sheet?: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/
They don't seem to spell it out and just trying to compare apples-to-apples.

[foldy]

Region USA East (North-Virginia)

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
GPU-Instances - g2.2xlarge - $0.65 per hour

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/
g2 Instance is 4x g2.2xlarge = 10 Tflops
On demand 2.86$ per hour
Prepay for one year $15307

[PacMan]

Got it, thanks.

[FldngForGrandparents]

If they filed this as a non-profit they could work out a way to get your donation taken off your taxes I bet.

[7im]

They have been a nonprofit all along. There is even a donation link on the Fah web page setup for that.

The problem is, in 15 years of the project, no one has figured out how to value the work units that you donate, so kind of hard for the IRS to accept that.

[bruce]

The problem is, in 15 years of the project, no one has figured out how to value the work units that you donate, so kind of hard for the IRS to accept that.

The link allows you to donate money or a computer or other property to Stanford. Once you've done that, they own it and their admins decide what run there, not you. If you donate money (or property, or whatever) the tax agents know how to define what that asset was worth.

Those agents have trouble, though, when you donate a fraction of your home as a "home office" or a (small?) portion of your computer that has an undefined value. FAH management repeatedly says it's using unused resources on your computer so you can't claim the whole computer ... so they disallow and estimates of fractional value. (Besides, they also say not to buy hardware based on running FAH.) Allocating a few percent of your electric bill is a pretty shaky proposition, too.

A conscientious tax agent is likely to look at a statement like:

There is a project called curecoin which gives you a little money for folding but it is maybe lower than what you pay for the electricity.

and say: Ok, your contribution for last year was worth less than half a dollar, so it rounds off to zero.