carbond: An Operating-System Daemon for Carbon Awareness

Abstract

To reduce the carbon footprint of software, it is imperative that systems first become aware of their footprint. Despite various proposals to make software carbon aware via application-level development kits, we believe awareness of and adjustment to carbon-emission information is an operating-system duty—similar to how it manages time information today. In this paper, we motivate and envision carbond, a Linux-based service to mediate carbon information between hardware (including power supply) and application-level software. Following the recently established Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) standard, carbond deals with operational as well as embodied emissions and has different units of work (low level as CPU cycle up to high-level as user request) in mind. In addition to the service itself, we showcase how it can be used by application SDKs (libraries) as well as command-line utilities.