Collaborative Research: Workshop Series on Sustainable Computing

The advancement of computing remains focused on ever increasing performance. While energy has become a metric of interest for mitigating thermal issues or increasing battery life of mobile devices, energy efficiency has largely neglected sustainability and in particular, computing's impact on the environment and energy resources of the planet. For example, while embodied environmental costs (e.g., carbon emissions) of integrated-circuit (IC) manufacturing often exceed its operational carbon footprint, this is relatively unknown or the reverse is presumed to be true in the computing community.

Furthermore, the use of rare metals such as tantalum, tungsten, and gold, in electronic equipment contribute to the inevitable exhaustion of the planet's resources. There is an urgent need to consider factors beyond operational-phase energy consumption of the computing infrastructure to truly combat carbon and other harmful emissions present during the full computing lifecycle to combat the existential threat of climate change.

This project proposes a series of community oriented activities culminating in a workshop to both increase awareness among researchers in the domain of computing about these factors of sustainable computing and to specify the challenges and potential possible solutions to achieve sustainable computing including, but also beyond the operational phase of the computing technology. A particular goal will be to facilitate cross pollination of ideas among researchers across different disciplines encompassing not only computing sciences but also, environmental sciences and political sciences to identify sustainable methodologies for design and operation of computing infrastructure.

The novelty and intellectual merit of this project is in identifying gaps in knowledge that need to be bridged to truly make computers sustainable. In particular, this project will start with a series of invited talks from experts from diverse fields with deep insights on these aspects that ultimately affect the sustainability of computing resources targeted at computing researchers.

These talks will be delivered remotely with an online platform. Following these enlightening talks, this project will host an in-person workshop bringing computing researchers together to discuss the lessons learned from the talks and how these ideas can be incorporated in various types of computing devices from low power miniature systems such as Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices to warehouse-scale computers such as data centers.

Through this activities, the intention is to create awareness and strategies to create a sustainable future for computing systems.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.