[slizard]

> Does anyone else do it better?

To that question, assuming by "anyone" here you are asking about other donate-your-cycles-distributed-computing-projects: I am not too familiar with how well-optimized the codes of different @home projects are.

Taking a few steps back, perhaps the efficiency of these codes is the lesser issue and to be honest, in some (many?) cases other forms of donation/contribution may further more scientific progress than simply crunching numbers on one's home PC.

[swinglock]

Yes, I'm referring to @home projects.

Totally, but if the work done @home is useful, donating compute time makes economical sense I think.

If I'm willing to donate $10 I can either donate money and it may be used to buy $10 worth of compute, with should cover all costs including the hardware and administration.

Or I can donate $10 worth of pure electricity and the other marginals I cover for no or a very small extra cost, since I already own the hardware for other purposes which it's temporarily not used for.

In the latter case the value of my $10 is higher, I theorize. Again, given that the @home project is truly useful.

[slizard]

Unfortunately typically there is no way to directly donate funds (especially not $10, even if there are 10000 people who'd do that on a monthly basis) to some research (group) of one's choosing. Therefore the choice is whether to donate to an @home project and trust that what they do is meaningful and the donated resources are used in a responsible manner.

In that respect, the responsibility of whether to ask for and how to make good use of donations lies solely on the teams that receive the donation. Without oversight it would however be foolish of them to be overly critical on their own shortcomings as there is a great benefit to having these cheap FLOPS (and good PR) that F@H brings.

I was about to suggest that it would be great to set up a merit-based funding scheme somewhat akin to the governamental funding agencies, but one run independently by the "council of the people". I'm however uncertain how effective could such an organization be at awarding the funding in a responsible and effective manner.