CCRI: New: A Community Testbed for Designing Carbon-Efficient Cloud Applications

近几十年来，云平台的增长推动了一系列多样化在线服务的兴起，但也导致了能源消耗的增加，从而导致了碳排放。云平台处于有利地位，可以通过过渡到更清洁的能源来减少碳排放，因为云应用程序通常具有显著的空间、时间和性能灵活性，使它们能够改变执行的地点、时间和强度，以更好地与无碳可再生能源或低碳电网能源的可用性保持一致。不幸的是，研究人员无法利用这种独特的优势组合来试验和优化云应用的碳效率，因为目前的云平台没有向他们展示能源的碳特征。为了解决这个问题，该项目将设计并实现一个共享社区试验台，用于试验碳效率高的云应用程序的设计。试验台将部署在具有本地能源系统的边缘数据中心，该系统包括共用太阳能电池板、电池和冷却系统。试验台软件将通过向云应用程序提供软件定义的能见度和控制力来实现能源系统的虚拟化，这将使开发能够响应清洁能源和碳动态的新型碳效率云应用程序的丰富但未开发的设计空间成为可能。该项目在推进碳效率云应用程序设计方面具有重大技术影响，这对于减少云平台日益增加的能源使用和碳足迹带来的环境破坏非常重要。该项目将涉及重要的社区推广活动，包括年度讲习班和教程，以提高人们对优化碳效率重要性的认识，并展示试验台如何能够促进和推进碳效率研究。该项目还计划通过将可持续计算主题纳入当地初中生和高中生暑期项目的一部分来开展外联活动。该项目将把试验床的使用纳入目前的云计算和绿色计算课程，以获得对试验床的反馈，并丰富学生的学习环境。最后，除了向社区提供试验床之外，该项目还将通过UMassTraceRepository向社区提供由该项目开发的软件构件和数据集，该库托管着研究人员收集的许多开放数据集。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

While the growth of cloud platforms has fueled the rise of a diverse set of online services in recent decades, it has also led to increasing energy consumption and, hence, carbon emissions. Cloud platforms are well-positioned to reduce their carbon emissions by transitioning to cleaner energy sources because cloud applications often have significant spatial, temporal, and performance flexibility, enabling them to shift the location, time, and intensity of their execution to better align with the availability of carbon-free renewable energy or low-carbon grid energy. Unfortunately, researchers cannot leverage this unique combination of advantages to experiment with and optimize cloud applications' carbon-efficiency because current cloud platforms do not expose energy's carbon characteristics to them. To address the problem, this project will design and implement a shared community testbed for experimenting with the design of carbon-efficient cloud applications. The testbed will be deployed in an edge data center with a local energy system that includes a co-located solar array, batteries, and cooling system. The testbed software will virtualize the energy system by exposing software-defined visibility and control of it to cloud applications, which will enable experimentation with a rich, but unexplored, design space for developing novel carbon-efficient cloud applications capable of responding to clean energy and carbon dynamics.The project has the potential for significant technical impact in advancing the design of carbon-efficient cloud applications, which is important for reducing environmental damage associated with cloud platforms' increasing energy usage and carbon footprint. The project will involve significant community outreach, including annual workshops and tutorials, to both raise awareness of the importance of optimizing for carbon-efficiency and demonstrate how the testbed can enable and advance carbon-efficiency research. The project also plans to conduct outreach by incorporating sustainable computing topics as part of summer programs for local middle and high school students. The project will incorporate use of the testbed into current courses on cloud computing and green computing to both get feedback on the testbed and to enrich students' learning environment. Finally, in addition to making the testbed available to the community, the project will make the software artifacts and datasets developed by the project available to the community via the UMass Trace Repository, which hosts many open datasets collected by researchers.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.