Green Algorithms: Quantifying the carbon footprint of computation

Understand

Climate change is profoundly affecting nearly all aspects of life on earth, including human societies, economies and health.

• Various human activities are responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions, including data centres and other sources of large-scale computation.
• Although many important scientific milestones have been achieved thanks to the development of high-performance computing, the resultant environmental impact has been underappreciated.
• In this paper, we present a methodological framework to estimate the carbon footprint of any computational task in a standardised and reliable way, based on the processing time, type of computing cores, memory available and the efficiency and location of the computing facility.