Here is a copy of the email I sent today to David Anderson :

Electricity production, and home heating / cooling are two important struggles of the anthopocene.

With BOINC and other distributed computing, and also with crypto currencies
I think exists an opportunity.

If within Boinc or the projects themselves you create data about :
- geographic location of the processor

You may enable local government AND the utility company to gain some level of control over power used.

An idle computer produce very little heat, while a working computer works as an electrical heater.

Power utility companies struggle at some points in the year or in the day to up or down produce power to align with power used.

Examples in my mind :
- reduce power used during hot months, or heat waves (linked with government/weather forecast)
- reduce power used when everyone goes back home after work (helps with the duck curve)
- allow full power during cold days, except if power plant struggles;
- etc.

To go more in depth :
if a project presents some form of emergency, like medical research about drugs or vaccine during a pandemic, the specific project may have a temporary bypass.

The idea is for the regulator to have access to a potentiometer over CPU/GPU % used according to local and time schedule law / ecology.

Food for thought,
maybe a way to help save the ability of Earth to support human life.


Sincerely yours :

--

Alexandre Lollini
ESPACE Lollini ------------------- www.espacelollini.com
Official Philatelic Editor of the European Space Agency.
Space stamps and mail for collectors

I think it's a bad idea. Regulators are not needed. Especially not to regulate MY CPU or GPU power consumption.

The Idea of BOINC is not to run 2 servers at home but to use it on some cores of your CPU while you are browsing the web or do whatever.
In general servers in a large datacenter will always be more efficient, BOINC tries to use computing power that is technically existing but not being utilized

And the whole point of BOINC is volunteer computing. This means anybody can set up a project and no governments should interfere with that.
If the government or any control entity would be able to prioritize projects, that would be a bad day for BOINC I think.

---

Yes, free country! Let it be like that!
I do wish that GPUs will become more available, and more powerful,for more efficient folding/GPU crunching.

And we're about to see the new Nvidia 4000 GPUs coming out!

With that, a lot of crypto miners will buy them up, and releasing their 3000-series GPUs on the second hand market.
RTX 3000 series GPUs are great for Boinc.
Can't wait for RTX 7000 to come out now!

I would not want to give up control of my computer like that. As for the general location of computers, that (except for those using a vpn) is already available to some degree via the ip addresses of the computers.