Why are they not appealing to the major cloud providers at this time to use any spare resources couldn't they set it up so that the cloud providers could count using resources as donation to a charity?
It's just so fresh it hasn't been posted anywhere yet:
"Normally we’d wait to publish this work until it had been peer-reviewed for an academic journal. However, given the potential seriousness and time-sensitivity of the situation, we’re releasing the predicted structures as we have them now, under an open license so that anyone can make use of them."
Kudos to Google for doing this. It is so much more effective to marshall a small number of extremely powerful cloud providers backed by very qualified and active techies, than a large number of weak providers (people using their home machines).
Cloud providers do not have much unused resource. Tricks like spot instances make sure that they are as close to 100% utilization as possible while still being able to handle a spike in demand.
There should be no need to write it off as charity. If you spin up instances, it's a cost which gets written off as any other cost. If you use those for folding at home, that's your (business') thing. (Obviously, this is generalized and your local tax situation may differ)
That’s their point. If you’re billed for instances, but those instances are used for charity and can be written off taxes, then why not? Tax write off donations in the form of product usually help clear out stock/keep things moving. They’re like a guaranteed sale. So it may be best to appeal to the providers of the instances.
In the US you wouldn't be able to write that bill off as a legitimate business expense. The auditor would ask "What legitimate business purpose does this represent?" and they wouldn't have an answer.
If a business allows a nonprofit to use excess capacity, the capacity is still a business expense.
Google and AWS have huge amounts of unused computer capacity at low traffic periods. They can still expense those items even if they allow charitable use when not needed for business use.
Worst case if no unused capacity a business can call the expense a marketing expense and can ask the nonprofit to acknowledge their support of the activity. This is not uncommon.
I wasn't talking about AWS writing it off, but someone else buying that capacity to use for distributed computing for the CV. You have to donate to an approved 501C3 for it to count.
