[SCION] Geocoding SCION info - how would I do this for a demo?

[Chris Adams]

Hi folks,

I’m doing a talk at RIPE 84 tomorrow about sustainability and IT (specifically networks), and I have a question about SCION’s AS system, this article here, and the state of geolocation to make this idea possible.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/03/internet-carbon-emissions-data-path-scion/ <https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/03/internet-carbon-emissions-data-path-scion/>

Some background

I’ve recently been doing work to annotate every public IP that can be looked up with common geocoders with annual carbon intensity information.

This was initially to make it easier for providers of hosting services to easily disclose carbon emissions information based on their location, and to use this information for scheduling workloads.

I’ve been discussing this with the folks Hashicorp and specifically implementing it in Nomad, an alternative workload scheduling tool you might use in place of Kubernetes.

This is now an experimental "carbon aware" branch of Nomad with an updated scheduler that does this, by using a carbon scoring algorithm for deciding where and when to run jobs:
https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/blob/d8b3a61d9ab85d3102e6c666af9f11c2a4a04ae5/CARBON.md <https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/blob/d8b3a61d9ab85d3102e6c666af9f11c2a4a04ae5/CARBON.md>

This PR I merged in today exposes an API endpoint to get carbon intensity for any publicly available IP address, based on it’s likely location (although the data is only as good as the database I’m currently using from Maxmind, so all the usual caveats apply)
https://github.com/thegreenwebfoundation/admin-portal/pull/248 <https://github.com/thegreenwebfoundation/admin-portal/pull/248>

You can see some docs at the link below, and a way to try out the API with various IP addresses yourself (warning - I just merged it today, and it may be buggy!)
https://api.thegreenwebfoundation.org/api-docs/ <https://api.thegreenwebfoundation.org/api-docs/>

I’d like to move towards have monthly carbon intensity figures, at a national level, by the end of the year - something that folks who run hosted services would be able to disclose information about how they are accounting for the rest of the emissions, probably using some new tools and standards like Granular Certificates (linked below) - these provide hourly information about the carbon intensity of generation from various sources.

https://www.energytag.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/EnergyTag-and-granular-energy-certificates.pdf <https://www.energytag.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/EnergyTag-and-granular-energy-certificates.pdf>

The carbon intensity data I’m using is open and freely available, and the geolocation data is not super duper precise, but it is free.

Doing the same for routing with SCION

However, these are all ideas for the regular old internet, and I don’t know what the latest is since reading that piece in the WEF last year.

I’d like to figure see if it’s possible to use any of what I’ve learned on SCION - are there any demos in the public domain, or examples to refer to, if I wanted to tell people about SCION’s routing abilities in the context of ranking routes based on likely carbon intensity?

Thanks

Chris






Chris Adams

Co-director

w: thegreenwebfoundation.org
e: chris at thegreenwebfoundation.org
t: @mrchrisadams

The Green Web Foundation
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