Maybe this one:
https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewpostinthread?post=605906

Hi,
Have further requests for information been refused? Material created for greater transparency promotes further volunteer participation. Sources of transparency can be cited and shared. It's a good thing all around. Was the information request presented to the IBM community grid, Boinc, or a research group?

I would like you to know that since my mother died from cancer I've already resumed crunching for cancer in WCGrid and I'm also crunching on Rosetta because of Covid. I am relativizing my costs' concerns for the moment, but I still think the costs' estimation challenge should be taken. Seriously. Transparency is very important to me.

All the best and Covid-19 to the gallows!

I do share the topic starter's feelings, but from a completely different perspective.

People don't own PCs or laptops anymore, but tablets and Chromebooks, with very limited computational power. They can have virtually no impact on the science at all; it just takes too long and hampers the use of their device for the actual purpose they bought it for.

15 years ago it was normal to have a 250W+ PC idling all day, these day's that's not common anymore. People also try to lower their monthly electricity bill for cost savings or environmental impact. Grid computing does the exact opposite.

Cloud computing is getting cheaper and cheaper. How long until it will be cheaper for the scientists to just run their experiments in the cloud, get results faster and get the computational bill redirected to be shared with other cloud-enabled parts of the university or business?

Mind you, business that use the cloud won't be buying new servers anymore; wanting to own (powerful) hardware is not so common anymore due to (upfront) costs and the inability to scale up or down. Also, should hyperscale cloud providers ever shift to a different CPU architecture (f.e. ARM) due to costs and lower cooling requirements, even more spare/idle computing time is lost. Currently, AWS is already running it's servers with an average load of over 60%, where as on-premise servers tend to only see 20% average load. So there's less and less room for non-dedicated distributed computing efforts. Even my Android phone 'warns' me about this strange background app that is using way too much CPU time; 'should I close this app so your phone will run faster?' YES/NO

Grid Computing stems from a time when computing cycles were expensive and not a commodity. These days, computing cycles are almost free and energy (especially green) is very cheap. Then the question should be: why are we still involved? Are we becoming an unnecessary party sitting between the scientist and their dataset? Does anybody know if scientists still look at grid computing for solutions or do they just shrug their shoulders and fire up an AWS cluster? Is available computing time still the bottleneck or are Junk Science and politics becoming a bigger issue?

I know that people involved in BOINC are constantly looking at ways to engage with ordinary people to get them to subscribe and run work units on their hardware. I just think that the world has shifted (or is shifting) in such a way that people aren't able to join anymore, even if they want to, and that at the other end, massive cloud computing is becoming cheaper and cheaper.

So where are we heading?

Those are the real existential issues at hand as far as I'm seeing it. Please share your views on this.

On the contrary, I think it's exactly the time to do more crunching with new devices. I have an Android TV box. It's now my main device for crunching because I can leave it on for 24/7. Its power consumption is very low, won't cost much. So do my other Android devices. I've been saying this in the forum for a quite while now that Android devices can be the most powerful computational power in the world. 1.3billion were produced just in 2019. Think of that.

My goal is to get, not buy, 100 Android devices and build a crunching farm. And I'll use solar or wind as power to make it green. A green crunching farm.