Dear all,

My name is Romain; I’m a researcher at ETH Zürich working with Laurent Vanbever. I have led projects on sustainable networking for about 2+ years now.

One important challenge the academic community currently faces is the lack of quality data for the energy a router or switch consumes. To address this, we work on fine-grained power modeling of network devices, and we need data to validate their accuracy “in the wild.” To facilitate that, we worked to realize the vision of “RIPE Atlas for power data” I pitched at last winter’s RIPE meeting. And I’m happy to say that we are ready to start distributing measurement units!

Concretely, we are looking for people willing to

• Install measurement units in series of each PSU of routers and switches. The measurement unit is an MCP39F511N power meter combined with a Raspberry Pi for management and data collection:

  

  We will provide the appropriate cabling. To control the unit, the Pi needs to be connected to a publicly reachable network via RJ45 (WiFi connectivity is technically possible as well, but requires additional setup)

• Share device-specific data with us, including at minima

  • Packet and/or byte counters for the active device interfaces.
  • Types and numbers of transceivers plugged in.

  and optionally

  • PSU-internal measurements
  • Operating system version
  • Fan speeds
  • CPU load
  • Average room temperature conditions

• Let the measurement run for at least one week.

• Send us back the measurement units (we provide pre-labeled packaging for that).

In return, we can only offer our sincere gratitude and the guarantee that your effort will contribute to the progress of science! I know it s not much, but I hope that’s worth something :-)

➡️ If you are interested, please let me know by replying to this email. Thank you in advance!

Note: We want to publish the collected data (in an anonymized way), but that is optional. If you are willing to contribute but your organization opposes the data sharing, we won’t publish it, and we will sign NDAs if necessary.

Thank you again for reading! Looking forward to hearing from you,