Category: Environment
- Approaches to calculating network / website energy and carbon ()
Website carbon calculators are not very accurate, especially if they only use data transfer as the metric.
- Sustainable dev environments in the cloud ()
Is it better to replace powerful developer laptops with cloud dev environments? What is the carbon cost of my software development – builds, tests, deploys, code hosting, dev environments?
- Roman Climate Optimum and energy system resiliency ()
It’s quite easy to argue that modern civilization is much more robust and resilient than any ancient society, but consider how much of our critical infrastructure is written in memory unsafe languages!
- Predictions in energy and computing ()
Is it a good idea to make predictions about future energy consumption? Even mature public businesses typically only issue earnings guidance for the next quarter. Maybe it’s because predicting the future is hard?
- How much energy does cryptocurrency use? ()
Is cryptocurrency / Bitcoin bad for the environment? In 2019 crypto consumed 70-90 TWh of electricity globally, with 60-70 TWh of that from Bitcoin mining. What that means for carbon emissions depends on where the mining happens.
- Carbon aware workloads – current status, limitations, and opportunities ()
Why isn’t carbon aware workload scheduling more common? Data center level scheduling is infeasible, so what are the opportunities for developers to implement more granular functionality?
- Cloud emissions transparency stage 1 completed – what next? ()
Customers should now be asking their suppliers for the carbon footprint of the software services they buy.
- Clean energy buying incentives for data centers ()
Using a marginal emissions-based sustainability score incentivizes migrating workloads to a region with a lower marginal emissions factor. The emissions factor for that workload would reduce, but does it incentivize the deployment of new clean energy?
- Useful calculations – energy vs carbon ()
The ultimate goal is a reduction in emissions, but we can’t analyze improvements without reporting energy per unit of work done.
- Paper Notes – Assessing anthropogenic heat flux of public cloud data centers: current and future trends ()
Data centers are not 100% efficient, so they generate waste heat, which causes anthroprogenic heat flux, and can therefore be linked to global warming. But how much? And should we be concerned?