Speaker
Description
Modern computing sites need to operate on state-of-the-art hardware to achieve efficiency in both economic and environmental terms. As a consequence, sites accumulate substantial amounts of legacy equipment that is no longer competitive for continuous operation. However, this equipment still provides meaningful compute capacity and becomes attractive again when electricity prices are low or even negative, or when local renewable energy production creates periods of energy surplus.
The Breathing Computing Center project addresses this challenge by enabling legacy hardware to be activated opportunistically and on demand during such low-cost, green-energy windows. When renewable sources (e.g., solar generation) produce excess power, the site can temporarily integrate older machines back into service without compromising sustainability targets.
To support this, the dynamic orchestration tool TARDIS is extended to include dynamic, transparent, and on-demand bare-metal resource provisioning through Red Hat Satellite or IPMI interfaces. Combined with the balancing framework COBalD, TARDIS can incorporate real-time energy availability into its decision logic and scale legacy hardware usage accordingly. This allows sites to tap into additional compute capacity when energy is sustainable and cheap, and withdraw it smoothly when conditions change.