Abstract
While extensive research has gone into demand response techniques in data centers, the energy consumed in edge computing systems and in network data transmission remains a significant part of the computing industry’s carbon footprint. The industry also has not fully leveraged the parallel trend of decentralized renewable energy generation, which creates new areas of opportunity for innovation in combined energy and computing systems. Through an interdisciplinary sociotechnical discussion of current energy, computer science and social studies of science and technology (STS) literature, we argue that a more comprehensive set of carbon response techniques needs to be developed that span the continuum of data centers, from the back-end cloud to the network edge. Such techniques need to address the combined needs of decentralized energy and computing systems, alongside the social power dynamics those combinations entail. We call this more comprehensive range “carbon-responsive computing,” and underscore that this continuum constitutes the beginnings of an interconnected infrastructure, elements of which are data-intensive and require the integration of social science disciplines to adequately address problems of inequality, governance, transparency, and definitions of “necessary” tasks in a climate crisis.
Highlights
With growing digitization of human activities, greenhouse gas emissions (GHG)from information and communication technologies (ICTs) are increasingly a matter of concern
In carbon-responsive computing, as we define it, energy sources and computing elements of all kinds—PCs, networking devices, electric vehicles, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, large or small data centers—collaborate with the shared goal to prioritize the usage of energy with the least carbon intensity, regardless of whether the strategy is spatial, temporal, or a combination
While devices that live at the network edge might include cameras, phones, Internet of Things (IoT) sensing devices, PCs, cars, the edge itself is often a reference to a collection of resources that do not reside in a back-end hyperscale data center cloud, but instead reside locally or proximately
Summary
From information and communication technologies (ICTs) are increasingly a matter of concern. In carbon-responsive computing, as we define it, energy sources and computing elements of all kinds—PCs, networking devices, electric vehicles, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, large or small data centers—collaborate with the shared goal to prioritize the usage of energy with the least carbon intensity, regardless of whether the strategy is spatial, temporal, or a combination This umbrella term enables researchers to consider such techniques holistically, across a range of different types of computational infrastructures and energy generation infrastructures and in light of the sociotechnical implications that arise as these techniques mature.
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