Ok, so let's theoretically say that I have $100,000 to donate to RAH...what would be the best use and best way to donate? Would it be Option A: pure monetary donation or would it be Option B: by me purchasing computers to help the project?

If I simply gave $100k to RAH, I would guess that it would be prioritized in some fashion beyond my control...salaries, ISP fees, software licenses, hardware upgrades, who knows. Do you know? Could I control where the money goes?

Now let's look at option B: Buying computers to crunch.

I recently bought a Dell Quad-core system for basically $500 with 3gig ram and some other goodies...so if we do the math, I could own 200 quad-core computers even if I got a 0% discount from Dell. The electric bill would surely go up, and of course I would need to keep them running cool. But let's put the maintenance aside.

Is it better for the common good of RAH to have essentially 800 cores crunching away 24x7 or better for me to donate the money?


-Eric

---

I suspect the money would be better used by the developers and scientists than in buying more CPUs.

The CPUs would represent a fairly small fraction of total computing power and, and as time goes on their relative value would devaluate.

The money could be used by the project to improve the scientific code that runs on ALL cpus, or hire more staff to branch out in new scientific directions that might not be explored otherwise, or hire some consultant programmers to help optimize the code running on ALL cpus, or maybe help port it to other platforms (PS3, GPUs, etc).

If you make the donation, you can certainly make it with certain conditions. That might not be the wisest thing as you have a lot less information about what should be prioritized than the project managers, but it's still your money, so if you say "I give you this IF it is spent to improve research on X", it is then their choice to accept or not.

Or you could ask the project to submit you their best ideas of what they could do with the money, and you can then accept or refuse.

But if this isn't just a hypothetical, I strongly encourage you. If your donation helps speed up a breakthrough by even one month, it could still reduce human suffering tremendously.

In a related field, I'd also encourage you to donate to the Methuselah Foundation. SEe this short video to get an idea of what they do (healthy life-extension/longevity research, deals with the diseases of aging like cancer, alzheimer, etc, among others):

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/39

The foundation is here:

http://www.methuselahfoundation.org/

Thanks for reading!

---

I suspect the money would be better used by the developers and scientists than in buying more CPUs.

The CPUs would represent a fairly small fraction of total computing power and, and as time goes on their relative value would devaluate.

The money could be used by the project to improve the scientific code that runs on ALL cpus, or hire more staff to branch out in new scientific directions that might not be explored otherwise, or hire some consultant programmers to help optimize the code running on ALL cpus, or maybe help port it to other platforms (PS3, GPUs, etc).

If you make the donation, you can certainly make it with certain conditions. That might not be the wisest thing as you have a lot less information about what should be prioritized than the project managers, but it's still your money, so if you say "I give you this IF it is spent to improve research on X", it is then their choice to accept or not.

Or you could ask the project to submit you their best ideas of what they could do with the money, and you can then accept or refuse.

But if this isn't just a hypothetical, I strongly encourage you. If your donation helps speed up a breakthrough by even one month, it could still reduce human suffering tremendously.

I agree that the amount of computing power I could buy would only be the equivalent of a few days' worth of new "hosts" (according to the RAH homepage stats)...not to get too off topic but I still do not know what defines a "host" and have asked RAH numerous times to clarify...no reply. Is a host a physical machine? A cpu? A "core"? They are 3 completely different definitions.

As far as determining where the money would go inside the project, I guess I/we would need RAH to guide us (publicly would be nice) as to what are RAH's Top 5 needs for money. Is it porting to a new platform? Paying a few salaries? Exploring new research by hiring 3 people? If RAH had a Donation webpage that showed (like Seti@home used to) what they would do with donations, I think that would at least clarify...not that I am judging.

I would tend to agree that it would be more worth my time to give the $100,000 as a monetary donation and somehow make it a goal for me to get 200 pc owners (with quad core chips) to sign up to this project. Or 400 dual-core owners. That way RAH would win both ways. I'm just not sure how many more people I could find to ask. :) I'm pretty tapped out on neighbors, relatives, co-workers. I could devote a website and somehow publicly advertise, but that's really something RAH should be doing. I'm quite shocked RAH has barely 200,000 people (and what % of them are still contributing???) signed up (albeit a percentage of these registered users contribute on multiple machines) after the project has been running for what, 3+ years now?

Anyway, I'd like to hear from others about Options A and B...hopefully someone from RAH will chime in.

-Eric

---

Wonderful hypothetical. If such a grant is something you are considering, I'd definately suggest you contact bakerlab to discuss. Personal opinion would be that they'd like to have decision making authority over such a "resource".

A "host" is basically one running instance of BOINC. I mean one installed executable. So if it is running on a quad core CPU, its a faster host, and runs (by default anyway) 4 tasks at a time, but still just one host.

When I do testing of things sometimes, and install in a second directory on the same machine, I usually am assigned a new host ID. When I then uninstall there and install back to my original directory (provided I've kept the files that remain there when you uninstall), it connects back to the original host ID.

---

Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense