GREEN ALGORITHM: MEASURING THE CARBON FOOTPRINT

Abstract

The effects of climate change have a significant impact on nearly every aspect of life on Earth, including human civilizations, the economy, and health. Data centers and other large-scale computing resources are among the human activities responsible for large greenhouse gas (BSG) emissions. Other human activities also contribute to this problem. Although the growth of high-performance computing has allowed many important scientific breakthroughs to be achieved, the environmental impact of this progress cannot be underestimated. This paper describes a methodological framework for consistently and reliably estimating the carbon footprint of any computer business. The system can be used to calculate the carbon footprint of any computing task. A user can measure and report the carbon footprint of calculations using a newly created web tool called the Green algorithm (www.green-algorithms.org), which is freely available to the public. However, the tool is very simple to implement within computational procedures, as it uses very little information, does not interfere with pre-written code, and can accommodate a wide variety of hardware configurations. Taken as a whole, this research offers a simple, generalizable framework, as well as an accessible tool for measuring the carbon footprint of almost any computation.