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March 2021

3 participants
2 discussions

Carbon aware SCION networking
by Seyedali Tabaeiaghdaei 24 Mar '21

24 Mar '21

Hi Chris, I've just joined the mailing list. I heard about your email from Matthias. Regarding your question number 4 I should say that I have done two energy/co2-related projects on SCION. The first one which is my Master's thesis exactly investigates what you asked in your email. We're putting CO2 emission per bit of intra-AS paths between ingress and egress interfaces of each AS hop into the PCB. The total CO2 emission per bit of the path would be the sum of these numbers for all hops on the path. A simple beaconing algorithm is also needed to select and propagate the greenest set of paths. (We cannot propagate all paths due to scalability issue, so we should propagate the greenest ones) We are also investigating the effect of traffic shift from dirty ASes to green ASes on the behvior of dirty ones and their willingness to become greener. A simple model is proposed for that in my thesis. We will use a more sophisticated model in the later work. As this is not yet published, I'll send it to you as soon as it is published. The second project which is older investigates the energy consumption of SCION ASes. We showed that SCION can save around 7 GW globally mostly by removing routing tables from routers. There is a report for that which is not official. We may publish it in the future. Best Regards, Seyedali

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Carbon aware SCION networking.
by Chris Adams 24 Mar '21

24 Mar '21

Hi SCION folks. I’ve been looking at SCION as a potential technology to building a degree of carbon awareness into the internet, so that it’s possible to have path preference policies that optimise for carbon intensity of the routes chosen, but also to move compute jobs to areas, either geographically or temporally, where compute is particularly cheap and green. I have a few questions. I hope that a kind soul on the group might help me answer. Some background before the questions For context, I work at the Green Web Foundation, and was introduced to SCION by Adrian earlier, in a call. I find the technology really exciting, and it’s really cool seeing problems solved at a protocol level that I see large companies building proprietary stacks to solve for themselves. We’re looking for partners with experience using SCION, as part of a bid to the NGI Pointer funding call at the link below, to build a demonstrator of these ideas. We’re currently working with a small sustainable CDN provider, and a grid intensity data provider, come up with a user facing product that relies on features of SCION to make what I outlined in the my opening paragraph possible. You can learn more about the funding bid we’re going for at the link below: https://ngi-pointer-open-call-2.fundingbox.com <https://ngi-pointer-open-call-2.fundingbox.com/> The questions 1. Exit nodes for SCION - it’s my understanding that there are libraries you can use, to allow connections from a device to go from regular internet ‘into’ the SCION internet via an attachment point, at which point all the clever routing can happen, and then on the destination server you want to reach. origin -> attachment point -> multiple SCION hops > destination I understand there has been some work to make something like an 'exit node’, to allow connections like so: origin -> attachment point -> multiple SCION hops > ‘exit node' > destination I can understand how you might do this, by encapsulating the original origin/destination packets, but I’m not sure where to look to see the code for this. Would someone point me to where I should be looking, or if there is a specific issue tracker I ought to watch to learn more? 2. Exposing path preferences for carbon routing I've shared a sample path preference policy based on assumed carbon intensity of SCION AS as a thought experiment - I’m guessing at some of this on the SCION side, but the intention of this policy object would be: ‘choose the greenest route possible, even if it results in more hops, as long as the total CO2 is lower along the longer route" https://gist.github.com/mrchrisadams/12fa0d440b6873e8afef986aa78ec60a <https://gist.github.com/mrchrisadams/12fa0d440b6873e8afef986aa78ec60a> - We’ve have a prometheus exporter that exports these figures, so that the numbers can be advertised for route planning purposes. Both of the providers we consume data from in the grid intensity exporter can provide readings at a time resolution that I think would match SCION (I think we can reliably get readings every 30 mins for most parts of the world) https://github.com/thegreenwebfoundation/grid-intensity-exporter/ <https://github.com/thegreenwebfoundation/grid-intensity-exporter/> However I think I need some help understanding how to go from having this information in an prometheus exporter, and having a path policy to them being advertised so they can be used in routing. How can I go from here to announcing it via the beacons, so numbers like this can be used in routing decisions? 3. Getting help and advice We’re looking for someone who would be able to answer questions like this to join us on the bid, but I couldn’t tell who we should be contacting for this. We’re submitting this bid as a research project, and we couldn’t tell if it made sense to ask here or contact Anapaya directly, and once we knew that it wasn’t clear what an engagement might look like. Are the companies that offer retainer-type services or a block of time we could work into the bid so when we come up against technical problems we have someone to ask for pointers? Thanks in advance for my questions. 4. Prior work Finally, if there’s prior work in this field on SCION and climate, or papers that are already published - would someone direct us to it? We’d like to be able to point to it, and find fellow travellers too. I know about the this paper below, but I’m not aware of any others: Modeling Data-Plane Power Consumption of Future Internet Architectures <https://www.scion-architecture.net/pdf/2016-energy.pdf> Chen Chen, David Barrera and Adrian Perrig. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Collaboration and Internet Computing (CIC), November 2016. Many thanks Chris Chris Adams Co-director w: thegreenwebfoundation.org e: chris(a)thegreenwebfoundation.org t: @mrchrisadams The Green Web Foundation Van 't Hoffstraat 1 6706 KD Wageningen, The Netherlands

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