And the other thing is that if PCs start getting less popular (phone + KVM + RDP to the cloud or similar), BOINC will shrink. They're trying to cover their bets with this phone stuff. While I, the submitter, think it's cool and important, I seriously doubt people will want to spend much effort on it -- especially if PC ownership shrinks overall.
Also, you're talking about AIDS and other high profile projects. There are plenty of low profile, tiny projects that benefit a great deal from BOINC at a price point that is affordable.
FAAH has been going since 2005. They've scanned millions of particles against a number of receptor sites. And we have barely got a few molecules making it to the wet lab. I'm not sure that even a billion dollars on dedicated kit back in 2005 would have made similar progress simply due to logistics and the brute force game we're playing.
As you know, not everything works on the GPU. But it sure is cool when it does!
Thank you for your contributions. I've been on the team for a long time, too.
-l