[slizard]

> When donating money or compute time, I want my donation to be used efficiently and not be wasted by high overheads.

Fair point. I think this is something you should bring up with the authors of Folding@Home. I do not work on that project.

My personal view on this is that there is always a cost/benefit balance that one has to strike which is often tricky especially given the considerably constrained resources as it is typically the case in academic computational/simulation tool development.

It is however, as you point out, a great responsibility of the researchers and developers of codes to make sure that choices made and action taken (or not) do not lead to disproportionate waste of resources donated by volunteers or awarded through a grant by research funding agencies.

I do not know the detailed reasons why F@H chose to not update CPU "core" since FahCore_a7 (AFAIK based one GROMACS code from 2014), but it is likely related to the aforementioned cost/benefit analysis done in their team. One of the motivations could have been (just hypothesizing) that the software engineering efforts estimated to be required to update FahCore for CPUs (which generate a very small fraction of the "points") would have taken away resources from the GPU FahCore.