Demand Response: Scheduling flexibility for expensive tasks

[redransil]

Motivation Increasingly, when you use energy is more important than how much you use. See, for example, the duck curve caused by solar production in CA. Shifting power use by several hours can affect whether the power you use is cheap and green or expensive and carbon intensive. Scheduling tasks in response to grid conditions (Demand Response, DR) has become a big topic in data centers in the past several years, and it would be awesome to build something like this into FC. Making this the default option could substantially help the power grid when FC gets adopted at scale, which would translate to significant environmental impact.

Proposal Can we give miners some say in what time of day they do computationally intensive tasks, and make this easy for anyone in the network to participate in?

• It sounds like this might not be a problem for sealing. Can we allow storage miners to wait some number of hours before they seal a file?
• Alternatively we could make it easy for miners to submit bids during hours when they have inexpensive energy and seal immediately
• PoSt clearly doesn't give flexibility in how long you have to respond to a challenge, but could it give you some flexibility in determining when you are likely to be challenged (ie. twice as likely during some 6 hour period as during some other 6-hour period)?
• If you are challenged every day at the same time, can you do a one-time shift of that schedule?

There is no requirement here for the miner to determine exactly when they will have to do these tasks, just to have some statistical influence.

[whyrusleeping]

PoSt clearly doesn't give flexibility in how long you have to respond to a challenge, but could it give you some flexibility in determining when you are likely to be challenged (ie. twice as likely during some 6 hour period as during some other 6-hour period)?

No, theres no flexibility we can give here on PoSt for the challenges, however we can possibly do something to shift when the SNARK proof has to be generated. I don't know our exact construction yet (research still working on it) but I think there is some flexibility in when you can do these already.

As for the Seals, You can do a few things:

• You can increase the allowable delay between making a deal and posting the seal proof (tricky to do with client<>storageminer directly, but becomes much easier with repair miners)
• you can charge slightly different prices at different times in the day to offset energy cost differences
• you can just not make deals during expensive electricity hours