The big cloud providers already donate a fair amount of compute (for example, some time ago I ran exacycle, which provided teams like FOlding@Home and Rosetta with extensive computing power. However, the economics of cloud are such that nearly all large-scale compute needs to provide revenue to the cloud provider for the provider to stay competitive. I've worked with the US gov't funding agencies in the past to make it possible to get "cloud credits" instead of grant $$$ (and even sat on panels that selected grants to promote cloud computing over closet clusters). The US works quite slow.
IIRC, fold.it is from David Baker, and he has a stable funding pipeline due to the sucess of Rosetta.
Governments have a staggering amount of computational power. Good will is nice and all, but are we putting our tax payer funds to an obvious public need?
Do they? I mean, technically the US gov't leases a ton of desktops (not great for scientific/technical computing), and they own a few supercomputers for specific needs (national defense, weather), but mostly they fund modest computational centers in academic environments. Before cloud, I worked in grid, and grids strapped together the many academic and government clusters, mainly for embarassingly parallel workloads.
I don't think the government has shown itself to be a particularly skilled operator of large computing environments compared to the large cloud providers.
IIRC, fold.it is from David Baker, and he has a stable funding pipeline due to the sucess of Rosetta.