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

<aside> ⚡ 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.

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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