Building the reference systems
As the SDIA runs multiple research projects, also on the design of environmentally-friendly data centers, we aim to utilize some of the existing infrastructure - in this case from the ECO-Qube project.
Requirements for test systems
- Uses refurbished hardware
- Either recovers the heat or uses physical renewable energy (no certificates)
- Provisioned as bare-metal hardware (no virtualization)
- This requirement will likely change to support Kubernetes during the course of the project
- No proprietary hardware or software used (e.g. external energy-meters or proprietary virtualization software)
Simple prototype setup
On each test system, the following will be installed:
- An operating system (Ubuntu)
- The SDIA’s environmental data agent (EDA), which performs the energy measurement
- Gitlab CI/CD management system
- A modified version of the Gitlab CI/CD runner (execution system that executes test) which can read the energy-measurements from the EDA and display it for each test
Both the EDA and the modified GitLab CI/CD runner will be developed as part of the project and made available as open-source tools for further improvement by the community.
Verification
To verify the installation of the reference systems, we perform measurements using external energy-measurement equipment, to ensure our software-based readings are correct. That equipment will be removed once the verification is completed.
List of reference data center providers
- EMPA NEST - Swiss Materials and Technologies Laboratory
- Blockheating - Bare-Metal Provider using heat-recovery & liquid-cooling for operating data centers and greenhouses