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WLCG welcomes you to its first Workshop on Environmental Sustainability, held at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva (Switzerland) on 11-13 December 2024.
The meeting will be in-person, with online attendance possible.
Environmental sustainability is a strategic area of priority for many of the WLCG federations and funding agencies and the objectives of this workshop are to:
For those who will be at CERN early Friday afternoon, it will be possible to visit the ATLAS Experiment (underground area). If you would like to join a tour at 1pm or 2pm on Friday, or if you have any questions, please contact Zach Marshall.
Default duration is 15 minutes and 5 minutes for discussions
The single largest factor in determining the CO2 footprint of a compute resource is the CO2 intensity of the electricity used to power it. The carbon intensity ranges from 20 to 800gCO2/kWh, depending on the energy mix of the region. Due to the interconnectivity of the European electricity grid, it is not sufficient to look only at the regional electricity carbon intensity, but also at that of interconnected regions that could use that same energy. In a very real sense, a MW lower consumption in France can replace a MW of coal generated electricity in Germany.
On the other hand, there is very limited interconnectivity between the low carbon intensity Nordic grids and central Europe. An unused Nordic kWh cannot be transferred to reduce German generation from coal. It follows that locating our compute resource in Sweden, rather than central Europe, reduces its carbon footprint from around 1000gCO2/kWh to 20gCO2/kWh. One can question the assumptions in reaching the factor 50 improvement, but this will anyway make any O(10) percent improved efficiency of server, cpu, cooling, software, etc rather negligible.
We describe the power grids, interconnects and bottlenecks which lead to the objective conclusion that we should locate our computing where low carbon power is abundant and cheap but not transmittable. We also explore the artificial constraints which make minimizing CO2 emissions in this way a frustratingly futile endeavour.
KIT operates not only the GridKa WLCG Tier-1 Center but also extensive HPC facilities, large-scale storage services, and the fundamental KIT IT infrastructure.
Across these domains, we are actively working on various initiatives to optimize energy consumption and maximize waste heat reuse. We'll present our multifaceted approach which encompasses the following key areas:
In this talk, we will describe the studies undertaken at the University of Manchester to estimate and improve the energy efficiency of computing hardware and software used by students and researchers.
The goal of these studies is to build an understanding of the environmental impact of paticle physics research focusing on two fronts:
1) the carbon cost of the hardware uses for high power computing hardware and the local computing cluster
2) the energy efficiency of data analysis software and machine learning models in “big data”-related scientific fields including as high-energy particle physics.
The focus of this contribution will be the energy efficiency of scientific software algorithms and MC generation packages, taking FastJet and Herwig as examples, as well as the energetic cost of top tagging algorithms. We will then describe our plans towards a lifecycle analysis for computing hardware, as well as the policies that could be put in place for hardware re-use; this may benefit also the Tier2 where we plan to do testing in a second phase. We will also describe our plans for integration into teaching materials for software development courses.
The Tier-2 computing center at MIT has been established in 2006 and has been a prominent contributor to the CMS computing ever since. Over the years hardware has aged and we are faced with a major re-design which affects our principal design ideas that have driven our purchases over the years. In this context we have done a more holistic evaluation of the cost which for the first time includes power consumption based on our own measurements under realistic loads.
We compare cost of running an aging computing center and propose hardware retirement schedules that are more cost effective when considering power consumption and rack space.
Sustainability is becoming an ever-increasing part in the planning, designing and operation of large-scale infrastructures. Due to the international nature of the collaborators, these large-scale infrastructures end up being both joint-ventures building large machines, and the pooling of smaller resources to provide services for these machines. Research Facility 2.0 is an EU-funded project with a vision of developing a more sustainable path for the future of research. Its remit covers both of these areas by researching: the design and use of technologies for use at future accelerators; and the approaches we can take to manage energy at support infrastructures. Both have unique challenges in terms of environmental impact, but with the latter being of more relevance to the WLCG. DESY is the only institution on this project looking to develop strategies for the energy management of “green” data-centres. This talk shall show the results of some initial investigations in implementing energy management strategies at the DESY computing centre.
Default duration is 15 minutes and 5 minutes for discussions
CERN has been tracking its energy consumption and carbon footprint at the level of the organisation and department for several years. We are compliant with the ISO 50001 energy management certification. However, this gives only a rough overview of the impact. CERN IT has been working on improving the monitoring of efficiency and power consumption as well as understanding the total impact of their activities. In this contribution we will give an overview of CERN-ITs activities and future strategy and direction.
This study presents preliminary analyses of natural job drainage and power reduction patterns in the PIC Tier-1 data center, which uses HTCondor for workload scheduling. By examining historical HTCondor logs, we simulate natural job drainage behaviors, in order to understand natural job drainage patterns: when jobs naturally conclude without external intervention. These findings provide insights into the center's capability to modulate resource usage according to external factors like green energy availability cycles.
To further validate and extend these observations, simulations were conducted under various load conditions to evaluate the influence of job types and VO-specific durations on drainage cycles. An analysis of power consumption pre- and post-drainage, facilitated by ipmitool, allows for estimating potential power and carbon emission reductions in drainage scenarios. Building on these insights, machine learning models are being developed to predict optimal power scaling adjustments.
We propose a conceptual feedback loop to HTCondor that could enable real-time power adjustments based on fluctuations in green energy availability. By exploring these ideas, this research aims to contribute to a more sustainable data center model, offering a framework for adapting workload management to dynamic environmental factors.
The Scientific Data and Computing Center (SDCC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory provides data services (storage, transfer and management), computing resources and collaborative tools to our worldwide scientific communities. Growing needs from our various programs coupled with data centre floor space and power constraints led us to the construction and occupancy of a new power-efficient data center and on-going studies of new hardware architectures that yield higher performance per unit of power (kWh). This presentation describes BNL's sustainability activities in support of current and future needs of core programs such as RHIC, EIC, HL-LHC, Belle-II, LQCD and NSLS-II.
Data center sustainability is a phenomenon that has grown in focus due to the continuing evolution of AI, HPC and HTC systems, leading to the rampant increase in carbon emissions due to the unprecedented rise in TDP of current computer chips. With an exponential increase of demand towards the usage of such systems, major challenges have surfaced in terms of productivity, PUE and thermal/scheduling management. Deploying AI/HPC infrastructure in data centers will require substantial capital investment.
This study at the SDCC quantifies the energy footprint of this infrastructure by developing models based on the power demands of AI hardware during training. We measured the instantaneous power draw of an 8-GPU NVIDIA H100 HGX node while training open-source models, including the ResNet image classifier and the Llama2-13b large language model. The peak power draw observed was about 18% below the manufacturer’s rated TDP, even with GPUs near full utilization. For the image classifier, increasing the batch size from 512 to 4096 images reduced total training energy consumption by a factor of four when model architecture remained constant. These insights can aid scientific data center facilities to identify the ‘stranded power’ within existing facilities, assist in capacity planning and provide staff with energy use estimates. Future studies will explore the effects of liquid cooling technologies and carbon-aware scheduling on AI workload energy consumption. These results can help in the development of software or operational models, which may significantly reduce the carbon footprint at the data centers and identify opportunities for heat reuse.
GreenDIGIT (https://greendigit-project.eu/) is a TECH-01-01 Horizon Europe project that started in March 2024 to pursue environmental sustainability within digital services and service ecosystems that research infrastructures (RIs) rely on. GreenDIGIT brings together institutes from 4 digital RIs: EGI, SLICES, EBRAINS, and SoBigData to address the pressing need for sustainable practices in digital service provisioning.
Central to GreenDIGIT's mission is the identification of good practices in lemphasized textow-impact computing, which involves evaluating the broader computing landscape and identifying opportunities for improvements across various stakeholder groups both within, and beyond the RIs represented in the project consortium. The project will establish reference architectures and design principles that facilitate environmental impact considerations throughout the entire RI lifecycle, ensuring that sustainability is embedded within the entire design-implementation-operation-termination phases of RIs at the level of nodes, services and components.
Moreover, GreenDIGIT will develop and validate innovative technologies and methodologies that empower digital service providers to reduce energy consumption and/or overall operational environmental impact. By supplying technical tools for both providers and researchers, the project promotes the design and execution of environmentally conscious digital applications, aligning with principles of Open Science and FAIR data management.
Through education and support initiatives GreenDIGIT will foster a culture of sustainability among researchers and service providers, equipping them with best practices for lifecycle management and operation. By mapping the landscape of environmentally friendly computing, and by offering policy and technical recommendations, the project not only enhances the sustainability of research infrastructures but also contributes to the broader goal of mitigating climate change.
The first tangible outcome of the project is a landscape analysis that was conducted within the 4 participating RIs, and within other RIs that operate significant digital infrastructures. The presentation will share the first findings from this landscape report, which included responses from 15 EGI sites, many being present in WLCG too.
In the second phase of the project EGI members will extend the EGI-WLCG service configuration database (GOCDB) with environmental metrics to fuel “green workload optimisation strategies” in HTC and Cloud infrastructures. Based on the metrics the DIRAC workload manager (CNRS), the AI4OS AI/ML framework (CSIC), the Terraform DevOps tool (SZTAKI) and a Data Center Energy scheduler (CESNET) will be extended to optimise job/VM/task execution according to green strategies.
In summary, the GreenDIGIT project is a transformative initiative that champions environmental sustainability in digital research services, offering various outcomes and collaboration opportunities to the WLCG community.
LOCO2024, the 1st International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing was held in Glasgow on 3 Dec. It was an initiative of the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance that aimed to bring together researchers and practitioners from all over the world working on low carbon and sustainable computing.
The workshop provided a forum for presenting and discussion of new ideas, ongoing work and early results.
In this talk I will provide a summary of the relevant work presented and discussion points raised, on topics such as carbon awareness and energy efficiency, frugality and sufficiency, sustainable software engineering etc.
Collaborative approaches to raise awareness about climate change or ICT impact in the environment have become very popular in the past years. Examples like Climate Fresk or Digital Collage, where collective intelligence is used to understand and identify mitigation strategies, have found a tremendous success among general public and are happening worldwide. Getting inspiration from these initiatives, a collaborative workshop was designed with a technical focus on IT services relevant for the IT Compute & Devices group at CERN. The goal of the workshop was to organise a team building event, where participants could share expertise and knowledge, understand the impact of IT technologies in the environment and why it is important to mitigate them. The aim of the presentation is to share our experience designing and running the workshop, including lessons learned and next steps.
ALICE upgraded its computing infrastructure and software to handle the increased data rates and enhanced detector performance in Run 3. This upgrade significantly reduced energy consumption and CO2 emissions through:
- Optimized resource usage: Maximizing GPU utilization, parallelizing and vectorizing CPU code, and organizing analyses into trains.
- Energy-efficient techniques: Employing low PUE centers for tuning and validation of analysis, reusing generated events in MC simulation, and integrating support for ARM architectures.
- EPN infrastructure: Cost savings and performance improvements through energy-efficient cooling systems and extensive use of GPUs for real time data compression.
These strategies will be discussed in detail during the talk.
The rapid evolution of computing technologies, including AI and high-performance computing (HPC), has significantly impacted scientific advancements, particularly in high-energy physics (HEP). However, this progress comes at an environmental cost, as the energy and carbon footprints of computing tasks continue to grow. This presentation explores the energy consumption and carbon footprint of CMS simulation workflows, focusing on GENSIM jobs at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
We introduce a monitoring framework designed to measure energy usage and assess the environmental impact of HEP workloads. Preliminary results from the INFN-CNAF nodes demonstrate that optimizing resource allocation can significantly reduce energy consumption without compromising output. Metrics are normalized to provide actionable insights for sustainable computing practices.
Future developments aim to refine error estimation, build a structured database for footprint data collection, and establish automated analysis pipelines. These efforts align with the broader goal of mitigating the environmental impact of computational physics experiments.
Einstein Telescope (ET) is the proposed third generation ground-based gravitational wave observatory to be built in Europe in the mid-2030s. Sustainability is a key concern for Research Infrastructures and, thanks to its significant computing needs, ET has been charged with incorporating Sustainability criteria in its Computing Model already at the design phase. Although new, dedicated ET computing facilities will be limited in size, they will still consume significant energy. Distributed computing, using shared facilities, is expected to represent the majority of computing resources and thereby energy consumption. This presentation will summarise the current understanding of sustainability issues for Einstein Computing.
The ATLAS experiment relies on the PanDA workload management system to handle its analysis and production tasks across the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). In response to a request from the ATLAS Sustainability Forum, we've introduced a new feature: simple, informative estimates of the carbon emissions generated by each job.
To achieve this, we calculate CO₂ emissions by retrieving time-dependent, regional electricity grid emission intensities and using estimated core power consumption values. Emission totals are calculated in grams of CO₂, differentiated by region or a global average, and presented to users upon task completion. These estimates are also available in monitoring tools, distinguishing emissions by successful and failed jobs.
This feature is not meant to deter essential work but to raise awareness of the environmental impact of computational tasks, encouraging users to consider optimizing their workloads for a greener future.
The goal of this thesis is to develop an optimized task allocation algorithm for the Workload Management System (WMS) in DiracX, aimed at reducing energy consumption and maximizing the utilization of renewable energy sources. To achieve this, a combination of advanced techniques—including numerical optimization, clustering, and artificial intelligence (e.g., reinforcement learning)—will be explored. The proposed algorithm will take into account a variety of factors, such as (but not limited to):
* The energy mix at the country level (including forecasts, if available),
* Local resource center optimizations (e.g., waste heat recovery, cooling methods, dynamic downclocking),
* Global and local policy considerations (e.g., resource and climate pledges, energy regulations),
* The efficiency of high-energy physics (HEP) jobs at resource centers (based on factors like hardware performance, job failure rates, outages, etc.).
As this project is still in its early stages, the specific algorithm and the results of subsequent simulations and real-world tests have not yet been developed. However, this presentation will outline potential strategies for integrating environmental sustainability aspects into job allocation mechanisms on the grid and discuss methods for validating the effectiveness of the proposed solutions.
The HEP Benchmark Suite provides a comprehensive framework for evaluating the performance and power consumption of computing resources within the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), supporting its sustainability objectives. This presentation will outline the toolkit's capabilities and present examples where the suite has successfully identified opportunities to improve both energy efficiency and overall computational efficiency within the WLCG. Finally, we will discuss potential future enhancements to expand the suite’s capacity to further support WLCG’s sustainability initiatives.
During the HL-HLC era the WLCG, according to the current estimates, will be requested to provide millions of CPU years of computation annually. The largest single computing loads are particle tracking, hard scatter event generation and calorimetry simulation. Improving the computational performance of these loads is a very active research area that includes creation of GPU based codes and algorithms, applications of AI and to some extent the application of quantum computing (QC). There have been some recent advancements in the area of application of QC to simulation of particle showers in calorimeters. We conduct a first examination of energy cost of conducting calorimetry simulations using traditional approaches, AI-based approaches deployed on GPUs and QC-based approaches.
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is driving transformative changes across various sectors, including High Energy Physics (HEP). While the energy consumption associated with AI systems poses a challenge to sustainability, the integration of AI within HEP offers significant benefits in terms of efficiency and modernization of the HEP computing model. This talk addresses the critical issue of energy sustainability in AI, focusing on the factors contributing to its high energy usage, such as the computational intensity of deep learning algorithms. In response to these challenges, several strategies can be identified to reduce AI's energy footprint. These include the design of optimal deep learning architectures, the implementation of advanced model training techniques and the use of energy-efficient hardware.
The CMS FlashSim simulation framework is an end-to-end ML based simulation that can speed up the time for production of analysis samples of several orders of magnitude with a limited loss of accuracy. Detailed event simulation at the LHC is taking a large fraction of computing budget. As the CMS experiment is adopting a common analysis level format, the NANOAOD, for a larger number of analyses, such an event representation is used as the target of this ultra fast simulation that we call FlashSim. Generator level events, from PYTHIA or other generators, are directly translated into NANOAOD events at several hundred Hz rate with FlashSim. CMS showed how training FlashSim on a limited number of full simulation events is sufficient to achieve very good accuracy on larger datasets for processes not seen at training time. In this work, we focus on presenting the usage of compute resources for this new framework, for both training and inference, and try to establish a comparison with the full simulation of the CMS experiment.
For HL-LHC, recent studies have shown that around 20% of the total computing resources will be used for Monte-Carlo simulations. Without efficiency improvements the computing needs of the experiments will not be met by the available resources. Motivating research avenues in the realm of GPU acceleration.
In this talk, we will present the current status of the GPU and vectorised version of the widely used event generator MadGraph5_aMC@NLO.
We will discuss the performance improvements achieved so far, comparing the results with the original CPU version, and giving insights on the power consumption of these new approaches.
Improvements in algorithmic efficiency are, in principle, the ‘free-est’ sources of energy-efficiency gains, as reducing CPU time at a constant power clearly reduces total energy. However, it is not clear a priori that the same applies to porting parts of a code to special purpose accelerators such as GPUs.
We investigated this case for the Celeritas project’s GPU offloading for Geant4’s EM calorimeter simulation – this particularly relevant as ATLAS currently spends ~40% of its CPU budge in simulation, and ~20% on Geant4 ‘full-sim’.
We show that, for all cases, both run-time and energy consumption are reduced by moving to GPU. In the best cases, energy use is reduced by 42% and run-time by 54%.
We will discuss how these observations extend to strategic considerations for applications of accelerators to NetZero targets in the HL-LHC regime.
In order to achieve the higher performance year on year required by the 2030s for future LHC upgrades at a sustainable carbon cost to the environment, it is essential to start with accurate measurements of the state of play. Whilst there have been a number of studies of the carbon cost of compute for WLCG workloads published, rather less has been said on the topic of storage, both nearline and archival.
We present a study of the embedded and ongoing carbon costs of storage in multiple configurations, from Tape farms through to SSDs, within the UK Tier-1 and Tier-2s and discuss how this directs future policy.
The current capacity of the CERN's data storage tape infrastructure is around 1 EB.
The talk will first explain the 3 building blocks of this technology (automation, tape drives and media), their lifecycle and different resource requirements.
By using data compiled by IBM and Spectra Logic we will then outline the environmental and sustainability impacts of CERN's configuration in terms CO2 emissions and power consumption.
In the 3rd section we will explore how different usage patterns have different requirements on the overall infrastructure.
In the push for sustainable solutions in High Energy Physics (HEP) computing, our WLCG Tier2 site at ScotGrid Glasgow has adopted ARM-based servers, achieving full production integration with increasingly positive results. Today we run significant workloads on ARM, including ATLAS production tasks, and our findings indicate a measurable reduction in energy consumption compared to traditional x86 servers. This talk will present the energy savings achieved so far and an outlook for the near future.
We will also outline recent efforts to standardize power-efficiency metrics across HEP centers by developing a unified HEP-Score/Watt output format in collaboration with the HEPiX Benchmark Working Group, to facilitate consistent data aggregation and reporting on energy efficiency.
Additionally, drawing inspiration from ATLAS PanDA CO2 reporting, we provide an example of power usage accounting at our site. Leveraging runtime data from Prometheus and power statistics, we calculate the energy consumption per Virtual Organization (VO), showing a potential approach to site-level CO2 accounting.
A model for computing the total life cycle emissions for compute nodes, based on providing a certain level of scientific computing over long time.
This takes real-world data from data centers, electricity generation, and vendor server information and simulates different replacement scenarios (from replacing it as soon as possible to keeping it a long time) to be able to optimize for minimal total emissions.
This work has largely been presented at ISGC and HEPiX, but since then we have a publicly available simulation tool as well as some minor improvements to graphs and conclusions.
The model is available at: https://codeberg.org/wimvanderbauwhede/low-carbon-computing/src/branch/master/LCA-model-equations
There are many activities on the region, experiment and site level. WLCG should help to abstract and homogenise these approaches with the first goal to understand, at the level of the federated infrastructure, the environmental impact of the services we provide. Together with the experiments and resources providers a set of approaches and tools need to be developed that allow sites and users to track their progress towards reducing the environmental impact, be it relative or absolute.