To reduce the carbon footprint of computing and stabilize electricity grids, there is an increasing focus on approaches that align the power usage of IT infrastructure with the availability of clean energy. Unfortunately, research on energy-aware and carbon-aware applications, as well as the interfaces between computing and energy systems, remains complex due to the scarcity of available testing environments. To this day, almost all new approaches are evaluated on custom simulation testbeds, which leads to repeated development efforts and limited comparability of results. In this paper, we present Vessim, a co-simulation environment for testing applications and computing systems that interact with their energy systems. Our testbed connects domain-specific simulators for renewable power generation and energy storage, and enables users to implement interfaces to integrate real systems through software and hardware-in-the-loop simulation. Vessim offers an easy-to-use interface, is extendable to new simulators, and provides direct access to historical datasets. We aim to not only accelerate research in carbon-aware computing but also facilitate development and operation, as in continuous testing or digital twins. Vessim is publicly available: https://github.com/dos-group/vessim.

翻译：为降低计算碳足迹并稳定电网运行，学界日益关注将信息技术基础设施的能耗与清洁能源可用性对齐的方法。然而，由于缺乏可用的测试环境，针对能源感知与碳感知应用的研究，以及计算系统与能源系统间接口的探索，仍面临复杂性挑战。迄今为止，几乎所有新方法都在定制仿真测试平台上进行评估，这导致重复的开发工作与有限的结果可比性。本文提出Vessim——一个用于测试与能源系统交互的应用及计算系统的协同仿真环境。该测试平台集成了面向可再生能源发电与储能领域的专用仿真器，支持用户通过软件在环与硬件在环仿真实现接口以集成真实系统。Vessim提供易于使用的接口，可扩展至新仿真器，并支持直接访问历史数据集。我们旨在不仅加速碳感知计算领域的研究，更推动其在持续测试与数字孪生等场景下的开发与运维实践。Vessim已开源发布：https://github.com/dos-group/vessim。