Toward Sustainable Software for HPC, Cloud, and AI Workloads
Software applications are considerable consumers of computing resources, leading to a significant carbon footprint. Recent estimates suggest that Information Technology accounts for approximately 11% of global energy consumption . Projections indicate that by 2030, data centers alone could account for 3–13% of global electricity use, a stark increase from the 1% recorded in 2010, propelled by escalating demands and emerging trends like large-scale AI workloads . The software industry is responsible for about 3% of global carbon emissions , which is very close to that associated with the aviation industry , and it could deteriorate if left unaddressed. Researchers have estimated that training a single machine learning algorithm for natural language processing may emit as much CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) as a small town with 120 homes would emit in a year . Another study reported that AI workloads in data centers made up 15% of Google’s total electricity consumption, which was 18...