Making Testbeds for Carbon Aware Computing

Host Chris Adams is joined by special guest Philipp Wiesner, a research associate and PhD student at TU Berlin, to discuss how computing systems can better align energy consumption with clean energy availability. Contributing to Project Vessim, Philipp explains how researchers are now able to model different energy consumption scenarios, from solar and wind power integration to the complexities of modern grids despite the scarcity of available testing environments. They discuss federated learning and its role in carbon-aware designs, along with challenges in tracking real energy savings. Tune in to learn about the future of carbon-aware computing and the tools being developed to help software become more sustainable.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Philipp Wiesner: LinkedIn |GitHub | Portfolio

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

News:

• Let's Wait Awhile: How Temporal Workload Shifting Can Reduce Carbon Emissions in the Cloud [03:26]
• FedZero: Leveraging Renewable Excess Energy in Federated Learning | Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Conference on Future and Sustainable Energy Systems [11:56] 
• Vessim: A Testbed for Carbon-Aware Applications and Systems 
• Cucumber: Renewable-Aware Admission Control for Delay-Tolerant Cloud and Edge Workloads 

Events:

• 1st International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing |  (December 3) [41:26]
• Code Green: The Intersection of Software Engineering and Sustainability | (September 12 at 11:00 am AEST · Virtual) [44:41]
• Doing for Sustainability, What Open Source Did for Software | (September 16 at 11:20 CEST · Vienna) [45:02]
• Engineering a Greener Future for IT | (September 18 at 5:00 pm BST · London) [45:24]
• Collaborating On Digital Sustainability | (September 18 at 6:00 pm BST · Brighton) [45:33]
• Green IO London | (September 19th - 9:00-18:00 - London) [45:45]

Resources:

• Environment Variables | Episode 9 w/ Philippe Wiesner [02:48]
• Vessim: A Testbed for Carbon-Aware Applications and Systems [04:42]
• Towards More Carbon-Efficient Federated Learning (Flower Monthly 2024-04) [13:18]  
• Vessim | GitHub [24:02]
• FedZero | GitHub 
• Let's Wait Awhile | GitHub 
• Kepler [26:08]
• GitHub - green-coding-solutions/cloud-energy: Cloud Energy is an XGBoost & linear model based on the energy data from the SPECPower database for the cloud to estimate wattage consumption of server by just a few input variables [26:14]
• [2210.04951] Ecovisor: A Virtual Energy System for Carbon-Efficient Applications [29:14]
• The Trouble with European Green Electricity Certificates | Industry Decarbonization Newsletter [40:07]
• Software‐in‐the‐loop simulation for developing and testing carbon‐aware applications - Wiesner - 2023 

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TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Philipp Wiesner: Optimizing energy usage for when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, of course it makes sense. But the big problem is that these green energy certificates, these guarantees of origin certificates, are traded independently of the physical flow of energy.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.

I'm your host, Chris Adams. Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and insights from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. Today, we're diving into the world of carbon-aware computing, how computing systems can align the energy consumption with the availability of clean energy.

Natural cycles govern all kinds of things we do. We mostly go to bed at night, and the food we eat is often influenced by what season we're in, and so on. This also shows up in how energy is available to us. You can see how day follows night in the output from a solar panel. And broadly speaking, it tends to be windier around winter than it is in the summer.

Even when we burn fossil fuels, we're basically digging up energy stored millions of years ago. As we move away from fossil fuels though, where we get to use the sunlight that was conveniently stored for us, we move towards a system based around harvesting energy, like we harvest food. The way we consume energy needs to adapt as well.

And that's the idea behind carbon-aware computing. But how do we know if our carbon-aware designs are actually better for the environment? With us today is Philipp Wiesner, a research associate and fourth year PhD student at TU Berlin, Technical University Berlin, whose work focuses on carbon-aware computing.

Philipp is deeply involved in research that connects the dots between computing power and renewable energy, and today will unpack the work he's been doing, including his work on Project Vessim, a testbed for carbon-aware computing. So let's dive in. Philipp, thanks so much for coming back, and for those who haven't heard the last episode when you joined us in 2022, can I give you a bit of space to introduce yourself?

Philipp Wiesner: Yeah, so hey Chris, and thanks a lot for having me back. I'm really excited. Yeah, so I'm Philipp, I'm a PhD student, as you just said, and a research associate at TU Berlin. I'm in the research group for distributed and operating systems. And I've been doing research on carbon-aware or in general, sustainable computing since the start of my PhD or my master's thesis in 2020.

And yeah, at the start of my PhD, I was mainly looking at the basics. So that's the first podcast we had two years ago. The field was still very young and we were looking at the potential of delaying the execution of workloads to make use of cleaner energy. Later, we also looked at migrating workloads from this to different data centers and so on.

And it was all based on carbon intensity. And then from then on later, we moved on from only optimizing for carbon intensity to really better understanding how electric grids work and rather optimizing for curtailed energy, excess energy. So, for green energy that would otherwise go to waste.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you. Okay. So you mentioned we spoke in 2022, two years ago, and the field has moved. And while we'll share a link to that podcast, where we go into a lot