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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Community
Forum: Teams
Thread: quantification |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 4
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
I suppose this is a 'recruitment' question and so should go in this forum.
An institutional user has asked for a cost-benefit analyis showing the value of participating in WCG. I recognize that participation is not necessarily a quid pro quo proposition for many of us, but if you had to, how would you quantify the value of the processor cycles you are contributing? How about other intangibles, if any? |
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keithhenry
Ace Cruncher Senile old farts of the world ....uh.....uh..... nevermind Joined: Nov 18, 2004 Post Count: 18665 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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What is your life worth? You may end up helping to save your own.
----------------------------------------Participating in WCG is not really different from donating money to a charity. It's more of an "in-kind" contribution. Much of the same reasoning and justification for donating money to a charity applies here. You're donating something you're not using, much like other in-kind donations of clothing, toys, etc. Yes, there's the cost of the additional electricity which may or may not be of consequence depending on rates in your part of the world. You could argue that there's an incremental amount of wear on the computer but do you account for the cost of mailing a donation too? ---------------------------------------- [Edit 1 times, last edit by keithhenry at Aug 22, 2007 8:37:46 PM] |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Cost is easy enough - get a power meter, hook it up to a sample desktop (or test several, if you have a heterogeneous network) and measure the power use during normal use, and under full load*. Subtract, convert based on your electricity price, and you have the raw cost of participating.
The benefits are hard to measure. Currently, there is no way of treating your contribution as a charitable donation (WCG is not a charity). Nevertheless, a good accountant will probably find some way to write it off**. An organisation deploying on a large scale will benefit from personal assistance from the WCG staff, and you can also become an official partner of WCG, with PR benefits on both sides. * WCG supports various throttling or limiting methods, so if the cost at full load is too high, you can scale back. A small step back can reduce the power consumption a lot, since the processor is running cooler, and cooling isn't required so much. ** I'm not an accountant. Tax laws vary. |
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keithhenry
Ace Cruncher Senile old farts of the world ....uh.....uh..... nevermind Joined: Nov 18, 2004 Post Count: 18665 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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No, WCG is not a charity but if they are trying to quantify to justify participating, I would respond that it's not really an economic decision but more of a moral one. Just as they may well support various charitable causes financially, choosing to particpate in WCG is much like deciding if and which charities to support. There are a multitude of possible justifications for supporting a charity and its cause and I think the same would be true with WCG. If you're trying to convince this institution to participate, I would show how it fits with their current position on causes they support. I suppose that they may be trying to do some sort of cost-benefit analysis that they may use to help decide between one cause and another. Some sort of support the most efficient/effective one. Still, what's a life worth? Participating in WCG would be a way to "give back" that much more without having to hand over a check.
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