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Earlier this week I was able to attend sections of the Eighth Workshop on Computing Within Limits.
The workshop website includes the program and links to all the papers.
I couldn’t do the workshop justice with a summary, especially since I missed nearly half of the presentations while multitasking with my day job. It’s an interdisciplinary gathering and brought in a diverse group of folks; many of them (including me) working outside of the academy. One paper I would like to highlight is a description of the “Solar Protocol”, which powers a network of solar-powered single-board computers distributed around the globe; these collectively host websites around the clock using exclusively renewable energy.
Here’s my mirror of the final paper, providing details on how the system works.
Low Tech Magazine’s “solar powered website” has definitely made its mark on this community, and many workshop attendees discussed how intermittent availability is one feature to help achieve ecologically sustainable networked computing. However, some resources probably should be accessible around the clock — and to people on the other side of the globe from their maintainers — and Solar Protocol provides one method to achieve this. I was impressed by the distributed nature of the system itself; it’s one thing to have a single server collect power data and update DNS records, but the sophistication required to allow the system to work in a decentralized fashion results in more resiliency. The parts required to build a node are readily available and most machines are running behind standard residential internet connections (with dynamic IPs), so there’s a low barrier for other groups of people to setting up their own Solar Protocol networks.
The code is open-source and can be found on the project website:
Solar Protocol homepage, which includes the current hosting location.
I want to thank all of the presenters, the organizing committee, and the co-chairs (Elina Eriksson and Lisa Nathan) for putting together an excellent fully-remote workshop, and extend my gratitude for them keeping it open to the broader community outside academia. I hope to someday contribute something useful to this growing community, but I am also happy to be able to participate as a listener.
—2022-06-24T00:57Z
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