Vessim: A Testbed for Carbon-Aware Applications and Systems

Understand

To reduce the carbon footprint of computing and stabilize electricity grids, there is an increasing focus on approaches that align the power usage of IT infrastructure with the availability of clean energy.

• Unfortunately, research on energy-aware and carbon-aware applications, as well as the interfaces between computing and energy systems, remains complex due to the scarcity of available testing environments.
• To this day, almost all new approaches are evaluated on custom simulation testbeds, which leads to repeated development efforts and limited comparability of results.
• In this paper, we present Vessim, a co-simulation environment for testing applications and computing systems that interact with their energy systems.