In the Air Force I use to code machine and assembly for networked main frames ( 465L-ITT ). I use Ubuntu, Mint and still have a system using puppy.

I wasn't asking for help. I was giving an example of what people are looking for.

I believe they are looking for a live cd/usb with a stripped down OS, boinc and a version of ram drive to keep everything in ram so no drives are needed except on setup/reboot.

The only problem with science united I see is that you have to join up to ask a question to see if you want to join up.

So here are a couple of ideas, building on the past few posts from other users:

We want as much computing done as possible. So, while there is no other option, let's keep crunching and have our friends crunch as well. But it would be great to setup a fund whereby you could donate money for the computing to be done on a cloud computing provider, where it's cheaper. To make things easier for the user, we could show a map of countries, indicating with colors where the price of energy is higher or lower than the adopted cloud computing providers associated with the fund. Do you know who could make this happen?

Another idea: the purpose of the account is mainly, I think, for you to track your contribution, which is somewhat fun, but another option would be having the setup all done for you with just the choice of a team; I guess the focus could shift from the Cruncher to the Team; if this worked, it could make more visible and needed that you make a bigger effort for getting your friends on board (in your team). You'd need a password only if you wanted to join forums and in case you don't want to do that, you'll be fine without your own user/password account, knowing that you're making a difference to the World (which is the most important thing) and to your Team (to help this there could be perhaps regular OS notifications of the work done?). It would be much easier to setup any computer on BOINC/WCGrid like this. Do you think this could be useful? Who could make this happen?

This is a good idea. However, from all the data I have, cloud instances are much more expensive than setting up your own cruncher.

For example if you look at the Google Cloud Pricing calculator:
https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator

For example a c2 instance with 4 vCPU (which are basically 4 threads) costs 36.88 $ per month, when it is preemptible. Preemtible means it can be stopped at any time, if someone else needs the computing power. This is no downside for WCG, but decreases the price to roughly 1/3. So this makes 9.22 $ per thread.

If I do the math for a Ryzen 3900X and add up electricity cost at high rates (0.30 $ per kWh) and 1/3 of the hardware cost per year, I arrive at approximately 1.70 $ per thread and month, much less than the 9.22 $ for a cloud instance.

Maybe the cloud threads are a bit faster. The C2 instances are Cascade Lake Xeons with 3.8 GHz all-core turbo, the Ryzen 3900X should run at similar frequencies. But nothing will make up for the 5x higher cost.
Show me a cloud compute provider with a drastically lower price than Google Compute, I would be interested, but could find none.

I guess the reasons are the following: server hardware is much more expensive than mainstream hardware. This has certain advantages, for example higher reliability and higher memory bandwidth, but no advantages for distributed computing. At a data center you must also add the cost for the building, additional electricity for cooling (which is not always needed for a cruncher in a home, depending on the climate). And you must pay people maintaining the hardware.


Maybe an alternative would be, that WCG users with enough knowledge would set up additional machines and let others, who want to contribute but are not interested in setting up hardware, pay for it on a monthly basis. One could provide the weak account key from settings -> My Profile, which would allow the owner of the machine to run WCG under the account of the provider of the funds, without needing the login data of the account.
If someone has a serious interest in that, either by providing computing power or by renting it, maybe start a separate thread for that.

I don't see the issue of energy pricing that much, both natural gas and electricity are currently cheaper than they have been for years, and yes, I'm located in Europe. Once I start generating my own (solar) electricity, the prices per kWh will easily match corporate wholesale tarifs. Adding solar heat generation to that, and my energy bill will reach zero.


Amazon AWS has a free tier where you can sign up for a micro instance: https://aws.amazon.com/free/
I do know that they don't allow cryptominers on their platform, so I'm unsure if WCG is allowed. But hey, it's free :-).
As far as a paid tier for AWS goes (see: https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator), a 4 vCPU and 8 GiB memory server instance is $ 47,- a month, or $ 525,- upfront costs and after that only $ 1,- a month. They clearly want workloads for a longer time, as that would be cheaper in this case, the longer you keep it running. Nothing as expensive as a massive datacenter with no workloads ;-).

Other than that, many employers these days own a Microsoft contract for office365 and Azure. In that Azure tier, depending on your contract, is the ability to spin up a free Azure cloud instance. 4 vCPU and 8 GiB ram, not the biggest machine, but free (read: already paid) for use.

WCG is part of IBM, so it would be nice if there are possibilities of using IBM cloud for WCG crunching efforts? I know the infrastructure is already used for certain backend tasks and storage, but to my knowledge not (yet?) for computing.