The BCS\Carbon Trust simulator

The (patent pending) data center cost and energy simulator was first conceived in 2005 by Liam Newcombe (CTO at Romonet). He was trying to answer the question: is it possible to create a ‘power factor’ type of ratio that would answer the question of ‘how much power will be drawn from the utility if I were to put this IT device into my data centre?’

What he realised quite quickly is that in order to actually answer that question with any degree of confidence and thus answer if a simple ‘power factor’ type calculation could be used, he needed a much better understanding of how the data center environment worked.

When he dug further it quickly became apparent that the data center, when considered with the housed ICT equipment, is quite a complex environment that makes simplistic analysis difficult. Some basic concepts came out of this early work:

• The cost¹ of a compute task can vary with where and when you run it
• There are fixed costs and variable costs giving marginal costs
• A simple ‘power factor’ style number is of no value when costing tasks

This early work then led to the development of the simulator. By 2007 much of the mathematics to prove the concept had been worked out. Then with the addition of some domain experts (mathematicians, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and IT engineers) a functional early alpha version of the simulator was created.

In 2008 Romonet joined forces with the Carbon Trust and British Computer Society to jointly fund the development of the simulator as an open source tool written in java. This can be used either in stand-alone form, or within other software that needing the ability to dynamically forecast and calculate the cost of running a compute task or activity within the data center.

¹ The term ‘cost’ is used to mean financial cost (£/$/€), energy (kWh) or environmental cost (CO2)