Put a price on the value of one work unit? Tax deductible?

[daveboden]

It's great that a large number of people, groups and companies provide their computing power for free to Folding@home's very worthy cause.

Some corporations, like investment banks, are very (overly) security conscious and typically won't run Folding@home or anything else that's not absolutely necessary for the running of the company. I work for a global investment bank; the amount of redundant computing power we have across our thousands of desktops and servers is immense.

These types of corporations are not going to take it upon themselves to think through and change their procedures so that they can comfortably donate their redundant capacity, and a little extra electricity, to charity without there being a serious financial incentive in place. I'm sure that these corporations would actually really love to donate the capacity; it would look great for their social responsibility stats; they just need a really big push to do so.

One way of providing a short term financial push would be by governments through the tax system. The government would benefit by furthering their country's high-tech credentials. A country with a mobilized grid of computers is more valuable than a country with computers sitting there idly.
It's important to recognise that the value of processing a Folding@home work unit is more than just the electricity. If Folding@home were to buy work units from cloud providers such as Amazon EC2 then there would be an associated cost. CPUs aren't free.

What if these corporations could write down the *actual cost* of providing the service as tax deductible? That's a strong financial motivation for my company, and companies like it with huge redundant computing capacity to mobilise that capacity and generate a significant tax saving. Writing down the cost of the electricity against tax is small in comparison to writing down the cost of providing the work-unit service.

So, my questions to you are:

* What do you think of my outlook on this? Do you think companies would respond to such a push? Do you think governments would care? (I'm optimistic that my company and my government [United Kingdom] would respond)

* Can anyone at Folding@home take up the challenge of providing a $ cost-per-work-unit or some other more sensible, measurable value?

[Slash_2CPU]

This has been explored before. The basic answer was so long as you are the one who owns the boxes, and you are the one running the F@H program, there is no write-off.

[Jesse_V]

It would be a great idea, but I believe infeasible. Work Units are not equal, and there are different types such as GPU/SMP/PS3/uniprocessor. All of these have different scientific value/contribution, and each uses different amounts of electricity and other resources. It would be difficult to get all the necessary things arranged just right, and then the Pande Group would change some things or new hardware would come out and the cost of a Work Unit would change. We fold for a cure for diseases, that I believe is the biggest incentive.

[7im]

What if these corporations could write down the *actual cost* of providing the service as tax deductible?

Donate the funds to run the service directly to Stanford's non-profit, and companies can write off that donation. Then Stanford can run the service themselves.

And while it may cost you a florin per WU to fold it, the cost to create the WU is not the tax deductable value. That value is effectively nil, because 400,000 other fah users also donate WUs freely, with no expectation of monetary compensation. As you first said, "groups and companies provide their computing power for free to Folding@home's very worthy cause."

The tax topic has been discussed in the folding forums every April (US Tax month) for as many years as I can remember. Surely there are tax accountants that fold, or they have relatives that fold, but none have ever spoken up to indicate any way to make WU donations deductable. Until then, the answer is still no. Sorry.

So donate funds to Stanford, in Folding@home's name, and write that off. And many employers will match their employees contributions, so fah wins doubly.

[fayzacantik]

if standford can put a score for each WU, basically we can calculated the cost of each WU without to much difficulties from the cost.
yes we can not calculated the actual benefit we got from this FAH but we can predict from how many lost from every Alzheimer patient for example,
nothing impossible, just can your country tax system allowed this deduction ?

[7im]

Consult your tax accountant/lawyer. S/he will give you a monetary amount that you can reasonably deduct without triggering an audit, for your local.

And if you get audited for some other reason, and the fah deduction gets disallowed, then you simply pay back the fah deduction, plus a little interest. S/he can advise you on this process as well.

Then you can make an informed decision on how to handle this.

Or as I said before, probably better to donate directly to Stanford.