Sustainability, Carbon-neutrality and Procurement for HPC

What does it mean for computer systems to be sustainable? We have made significant improvements to operational efficiency in HPC systems. We now need to consider a broader scope of environmental impacts across the life cycle of our systems. This includes how they are designed and manufactured, how they are transported, how they are operated and how we are tearing them down, re-using and recycling them after they are no longer useful. These considerations may not be obvious. For example, manufacturing costs dominate the lifecycle carbon footprint of systems and that trend is on the rise. How can we start to consider the carbon footprint across the end-to-end life cycle of our systems? We have a lot of capabilities to understand the performance, power and energy of our systems, but the same cannot be said for the carbon footprint. Should carbon footprint be a first-order optimization target? This BoF will present for review and discussion a draft proposal from the Energy Efficient HPC Working Group on addressing sustainability requirements in HPC procurements. Basic requirements are estimates of product greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. More advanced requirements are to use a standardized methodology for reporting product (GHG) emissions. Innovative requirements extend requirements for GHG emissions with water consumption, eco-toxicity and pollution. A further innovative requirement is to define GHG reduction targets. These can be included in a total cost of ownership calculation. A complete draft proposal will be posted at the end of April on the following website: https://sites.google.com/lbl.gov/procurement/home

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Contributors:

• Torsten Wilde
• Natalie Bates