Hello, I have a large philanthropic pursuit, in which I used my computer knowledge to build & maintain a large Distributed Computing farm. This is non-profit, this is not cryptomining! Consisting of approximately 270 PCs, most effort goes to aiding cancer research for the Princess Margaret Cancer Center. Specifically I run the World Community Grid project's Mapping Cancer Markers program which aids the cancer center in critical research. This is a global effort, similarly philanthropically to crunching for Folding@home. I will fully disclose my monthly electricity bill and regular farm updates. It is always $1200 or higher per month. Maintenance cost is minimal besides the rare fan or power supply replacement. Internet cost is static. It really is entirely electricity cost.
My source of income in purchasing these systems and electricity cost, is simple from Door Dashing and other food delivery platforms! I drive a lot. It can be hard to stay ahead of bills, taxes and house maintenance but so far I am staying ahead, barely.
Long term goals would be to upgrade hardware but I do not expect that level of commitment from the community. An aid to the electric bill would be superb and if you wish to contribute to the cause with your computer, great too!
Most system were built around 2017 with an i5-8500 in them, undervolted when possible for efficiency. Some are older but majority have that CPU.
You can keep track of my up to date computing efforts across all projects here; https://boinc.netsoft-online.com/e107_plugins/boinc/get_user.php?cpid=33c55b16c9b0fcc5446bc4e21803fec4
and here
You can see me on the 1st page of top contributors for World Community Grid every day (danwat1234): https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/stat/viewStatsByMemberY.do?sort=points
High-level overview of what Mapping Cancer Markers does for research; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfsBKnWEL-s
Electricity bills from 2022 onwards https://photos.app.goo.gl/oCAPTn7iFhE8tgmf9 full PDFs available upon request.
Update June 2025: Farm compute now set to Einstein@home's FGRP5 subproject for a few months until completion. Because, the recent BOINC Pentathlon (https://www.seti-germany.de/boinc_pentathlon/) has thoroughly demonstrated that World Community Grid's servers are the bottleneck in generating or sending out Work Units for the community. It should be greatly improved in the coming months, in which I will be back to fully support.
Please look at further updates on my Youtube channel's farm playlist; https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOvucQtyZA1-g2sgcCYPgVNRyOX0INXz8
Organizer
Daniel Watkins
Organizer
Vancouver, WA