During the 2019 BOINC workshop there was quite a lot of talk about people wanting to buy compute resources for their chosen projects, but not wanting to invest into hardware and take up the maintenance of it, for various reasons (difficulty setting up, high electricity costs, etc). Instead people would like to pay for cloud resources and adjust the donated amount as their income or engagement changes.

I went ahead and built the system for this: https://thescience.cloud/

It is very simple to start: just add money into your account, pick your projects and run as many computers as you wish. The computers are automatically started on a cloud provider and run for as long as you have money in your account. The computers get attached to your account (you have to add your weak account key), so all the BOINC credits also go to you and your team.

Supported payments methods are PayPal, ACH transfer in the United States, or SEPA transfer in European Union Eurozone. I add a small 7% markup which will hopefully cover PayPal fees, accounting costs and my hosting needs. 21% Lithuanian VAT is included, this is run through a legal company I operate.

Special thanks to the initial testers from PrimeGrid's Discord!

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PrimeGrid
Administrator

During the 2019 BOINC workshop there was quite a lot of talk about people wanting to buy compute resources for their chosen projects, but not wanting to invest into hardware and take up the maintenance of it, for various reasons (difficulty setting up, high electricity costs, etc). Instead people would like to pay for cloud resources and adjust the donated amount as their income or engagement changes.

I went ahead and built the system for this: https://thescience.cloud/

It is very simple to start: just add money into your account, pick your projects and run as many computers as you wish. The computers are automatically started on a cloud provider and run for as long as you have money in your account. The computers get attached to your account (you have to add your weak account key), so all the BOINC credits also go to you and your team.

Supported payments methods are PayPal, ACH transfer in the United States, or SEPA transfer in European Union Eurozone. I add a small 7% markup which will hopefully cover PayPal fees, accounting costs and my hosting needs. 21% Lithuanian VAT is included, this is run through a legal company I operate.

Special thanks to the initial testers from PrimeGrid's Discord!

Sorry for the super late post.
This concept is absolutely fantastic, and I've been giving this a shot over the last few days.
Here are my findings for this particular project:
I have 2 instances, both with 3 cores. It seems that system memory is only allocated to 985 MB. If this was just one core, it would do just fine - however Rosetta running on 3 cores at a time, with no way to limit its usage, is giving me just a few errors - some tasks can peak at 1 gb of ram usage when they're close to being completed, at least those are my findings.
So far, I have one errored task on each of these machines - all using CPU resources and failing after a day of work. Not sure if the lack of ram has anything to do with this, or excessive swap.
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/result.php?resultid=1116965297
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/result.php?resultid=1116966347

Again, this is fantastic and super easy to set up - literally just a few clicks - and I am one of these people with very limited space and funds to buy new hardware as it changes each year. This is a great way to get people crunching.