A Testbed for Carbon-Aware Applications and Systems

To mitigate the growing carbon footprint of computing systems, there has been an increasing focus on carbon-aware approaches that seek to align the power usage of IT infrastructure with the availability of clean energy. Unfortunately, research on carbon-aware applications and the required interfaces between computing and energy systems remain complex, due to the scarcity of available testing environments. To this day, almost all new approaches are evaluated on self-implemented simulation testbeds, which leads to repeated development efforts by researchers and low comparability of approaches. In this paper, we present our vision of a co-simulation testbed for carbon-aware applications and systems. We envision a versatile testbed which lets users connect domain-specific simulators for components like renewable power generation, energy storage, and power flow analysis with real software and hardware. By providing extensibility on the one hand and access to state-of-the-art implementations, datasets, and best practices on the other, we hope to accelerate research in carbon-aware computing. In addition, a co-simulation testbed can be useful for development and operations, like in continuous testing. We implemented a first prototype of our idea and welcome the community to contribute to this vision.