
Ask HN: Why aren't you donating your spare CPU cycles for science? - Patrick_Devine
I&#x27;ve been looking through various distributed cooperative computing projects like distributed.net and BOINC (Seti@Home, Folding@Home, etc), and they each seem to have quite a few machines, but compared to how many computers that are out there, it&#x27;s kind of a drop in the bucket.  That seems like a shame, because there are some fairly worthwhile projects out there like Cosmology@Home and OGR-28.<p>My question is really why aren&#x27;t you donating spare cycles to science?  Is it too obscure&#x2F;weird&#x2F;not interesting?  Is it too difficult to wade through all of the BOINC documentation?
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dalke
There's more to the world than science. I donate spare CPU cycles to the pypy
buildbot.

While I think OGR-28 is neat, what advantage is there in taking less than 15
years to knowing we have a perfect ruler? After all, we have a ruler now, we
just don't know if it's perfect.

Regarding Folding@Home, papers like
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3673555/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3673555/)
suggest that dedicated GPU hardware is the way to go these days. Reviewing
Pande's papers at
[http://folding.stanford.edu/home/papers](http://folding.stanford.edu/home/papers)
suggest that the limiting factor to understanding folding is analysis
capabilities, not data generation.

Cosmology@Home does not seem to be that active. Quoting from a 2011 message at
[http://www.cosmologyathome.org/forum_thread.php?id=590](http://www.cosmologyathome.org/forum_thread.php?id=590)
" Anybody who crunches here is probably just wasting his machines and
electricity for absolutely nothing.", and the welcome letter at
[http://www.cosmologyathome.org/wandelt_letter.php](http://www.cosmologyathome.org/wandelt_letter.php)
says "As a further incentive for people to participate we are considering
offering the Cosmology@Home Prize for the owner of the computer that
calculated the model that best fits the data as of the 31st of December 2009."

Given that the Amazon EC2 spot price for a computer more powerful than my
desktop is about $0.01, it's hard to be enthusiastic about spending my time.
See for example the comment at
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home)
:

> it has not been demonstrated that the order of magnitude excess in computers
> used, many outside the home (the original intent was to use 50,000-100,000
> "home" computers),[11] has benefited the project scientifically.

While that comment is unsourced, I see no reason to disagree with it.

