Proposal: Fedora at Home Project

[Jeffrey Ollie]

On 3/5/08, Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-03-05 at 09:48 -0500, Bryan Che wrote:
>  > What are your thoughts on this?
>
> What about the message that this sends, that we'd rather people kept
>  their computers on and busy using as much energy as possible to process
>  things?  Wouldn't we rather people's computers used as less power as
>  possible, and switched off as soon as they were no longer needed?

I think that you need to weigh the ecological impact of keeping more
computers turned on and using more energy vs. the potential social
good that could be done if only project X could get enough computing
power.  That's a difficult computation to make, and likely depends on
a number of hugely personal and emotional components.  For example, if
someone close to you is suffering from cancer you'd be more willing to
overlook the carbon costs associated with a project if that project
was working in some way to develop better treatments for cancer.

>  What if we could have some sort of carbon counter that interacted with
>  gnome-power-manager and some heuristics about a person's location and
>  the carbon cost of power in that person's area, so that you could track
>  over time what your computer usage is doing to your carbon cost?  Then
>  couldn't we set a carbon limit and only participate on the grid if you
>  have enough carbon cost to spare the cycles?

Other than the obvious difficulties in determining what the carbon
cost of a kWH is for every location on the globe, that sounds like a
useful project in itself.

Jeff