AMD was apparently proud with their added openCL value to the boinc project, so maybe we could negotiate with hw manufactures too, to give some heavy users (>100m?) some sort of 'coupon' in exchange for credit when they are about to upgrade registered servers?

Of course, the idea has to make sense, eg: when I say 'I want to upgrade my HD to an SSD, someone should be able to refuse the request as the project is not really storage-dependant, but when I say 'I want to upgrade my K8 to K10 architecture' (K10 has 128-bit SSE2 execution unit), that would be a main added value to many projects in here, even without adding many additional CPUs. the main advantage of the boinc project is that is actually allows us to verify if the users request is true, as the server is registered with one or more projects.

I'm not explaining all possibilities here, but I suppose everybody gets the idea: if you reach a certain point: you can use your credits to request an upgrade on your registered servers. if it makes sense, you get a certain shortage.

It will without any doubt make much more users try to reach some sort of level because they'd like to have the coupon, and when they're already commited that much to this project, they may stick to it afterwards :p.
of course, we need an agreement with the different hw manufacturers for this. (intel, AMD, nvidia, ...)

nvm, I just saw the bug in the idea: old servers will not reach 500m, and new ones won't need an update