Zero Carb

This application measures the energy consumption of software running on each computer within a team/organization, making it possible to obtain the Software Carbon Intensity (SCI).

It is an entry for the Green Software Foundation's CarbonHack22 Hackathon.

Getting Started

Pre-requisites

This currently only runs on bare-metal Linux, no VM, so you need a Linux installation.

VM and cross-platform support coming soon

You need to have docker and docker compose installed.

The solution relies on the Green Software Foundation's Carbon-Aware SDK/API. The SDK requires a WattTime user account. You need to run the Carbon-Aware web API to use this solution, click here to learn more on how to get the webapi up and running.

Create .env files from these samples, .env_sample and smartwatts-formula/.env_sample, in the same directories. Replace the dummy username and password with your watttime username and password in the newly created .env files.

Ensure that you have cgroup-tools installed, Run:

apt-get update
apt-get -y install cgroup-tools

Run

Clone this repository and its submodules by running:

git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:yusufraji/zero-carb.git

You need to add each software you intend to monitor to a cgroup. This step is currently done manually, and will be automated later.

obtain the pid of the application

Run python ./cgroups/src/process_util.py This returns a list of dictionary of all running applications at the moment, like this:

[
    {'pid': 103721, 'user': 'chrome', 'username': 'my_username'},
    {'pid': 103721, 'user': 'zoom', 'username': 'my_username'},
    ...
    {'pid': 280263, 'user': 'word', 'username': 'my_username'}    
]

Inspect the data to get each the pid of each application (user) you are interested in.

Add application pid to cgroups

Repeat below for each application you would like to monitor:

cgcreate -g perf_event:<user>;
cgclassify -g perf_event:<user> <pid>

if you get: cgcreate: can't create cgroup chrome: Operation not permitted, or Error changing group of pid <pid>: Cgroup, operation not allowed run the commands with sudo.

Run the application

Run docker compose up to start the services.

Visualize data

To visualize the results in grafana, visit localhost:3000 from your browser.

• Add the influxdb to grafana Data Sources:

URL: http://localhost:8086
Database: results

leave all other fields as they are.

• import the dashboard