Vessim: A Testbed for Carbon-Aware Applications and Systems

TL;DR

Vessim is a co-simulation testbed designed to facilitate research and development of carbon-aware applications by integrating renewable energy, storage, and real systems, thereby addressing the scarcity of testing environments.

Contribution

The paper introduces Vessim, a flexible, extendable co-simulation environment that combines domain-specific simulators with real system interfaces for carbon-aware computing research.

Findings

Enables testing of energy-aware applications with renewable energy models

Supports hardware-in-the-loop and software-in-the-loop simulations

Provides access to historical energy datasets

Abstract

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. Our testbed connects domain-specific simulators for renewable power generation and energy storage, and enables users to implement interfaces to integrate real systems through software and hardware-in-the-loop simulation. Vessim offers an easy-to-use interface, is extendable to new simulators, and provides direct access to historical datasets. We aim to not only accelerate research in carbon-aware computing but also facilitate development and operation, as in continuous testing or digital twins. Vessim is publicly available: https://github.com/dos-group/vessim.