May 4โ€‰โ€“โ€‰8, 2026
CERN
Europe/Zurich timezone
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Session

Contributed Talks

May 5, 2026, 11:30โ€ฏAM

Presentation materials

  1. Dr Hannah Wakeling (John Adams Institute, University of Oxford)
    5/5/26, 11:30โ€ฏAM
    Talk

    The proposed ISIS-II Neutron and Muon Source underwent a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) during the early feasibility and design stage. The potential environmental impacts were evaluated across construction, operation, and decommissioning to identify and integrate environmental sustainability practises from its inception.
    As with most modern accelerators, computing is - and will be - essential...

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  2. Mr Aditya Manglik
    5/5/26, 11:30โ€ฏAM
    Talk

    Problem:
    AI workloads are driving server memory capacity beyond the terabyte range, placing DRAM at the centre of both the hardware supply crisis and the environmental cost of modern computing [3]. Memory already accounts for 40โ€“46% of total server energy consumption , rivalling or exceeding the processor [1, 2, 8, 9], especially for training and inference of large language models [5, 10]. In...

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  3. Laurane Frรฉour (University of Vienna)
    5/5/26, 11:55โ€ฏAM
    Talk

    Astronomers have a unique perspective on the Earth, its fragility, and the absence of a โ€˜planet Bโ€™. Yet the carbon footprint of their activities and instruments remains substantial. The amount of data generated by these increasingly precise technical instruments, and the subsequent computing infrastructure needed to process and store it, poses a key challenge to sustainability.

    The...

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  4. Wilco Burggraaf
    5/5/26, 11:55โ€ฏAM
    Talk

    Mitigation starts by treating technical debt and digital waste as sustainability problems. Idle compute, chatty microservices, oversized payloads, unbounded concurrency, always-on resilience, and forgotten data, environments, or duplicate workflows all become permanent excess: more kilowatt-hours, more emissions, more cloud spend.

    We uncover where energy is wasted in everyday systems, from...

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  5. 5/5/26, 12:20โ€ฏPM
  6. Daisy Bradley (University of Sheffield)
    5/5/26, 12:20โ€ฏPM
    Talk

    In many science and engineering disciplines, limited representative training data, poor reproducibility and low interpretability hinder the complete integration of AI. The environmental impact of this growing technology is also of particular concern. Physics-informed machine learning (PIML) seeks to answer the aforementioned challenges, with many techniques leveraging physical knowledge to...

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  7. Irufan Ahmed (Imperial College London)
    5/5/26, 12:30โ€ฏPM
    Talk

    The Department of Aeronautics at Imperial College London is addressing the environmental and accessibility challenges of modern research by deploying a scalable repository architecture. This system integrates a custom InvenioRDM interface with Ceph object storage to manage massive computational datasets in alignment with FAIR principles. By leveraging software-defined storage on commodity...

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  8. Geerd-Dietger Hoffmann (Green Coding Solutions, University of Potsdam)
    5/5/26, 12:45โ€ฏPM
    Talk

    Time- and location-shifting of computational workloads is widely proposed to reduce data-centre emissions by exploiting variation in electricity carbon intensity. However, CO$_2$-only optimization can shift burdens to places where impacts are experienced locally, such as water withdrawals in stressed basins, worsened air-pollution exposure, and increased stress on constrained grids. We present...

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  9. 5/5/26, 12:55โ€ฏPM
  10. Dr Kirsty Pringle (University of Edinburgh / Software Sustainability Institute)
    5/6/26, 9:15โ€ฏAM
    Talk

    Research Software Engineers (RSEs) collaborate with researchers to develop and maintain software, helping to embed best practices that improve reliability and reduce inefficiencies in research workflows.

    As awareness grows of the environmental impact of computational research, a new specialism - Green RSE- is emerging. Green RSEs integrate environmental sustainability into software...

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  11. Deniza Chekrygina
    5/6/26, 9:15โ€ฏAM
    Talk

    Reducing the environmental impact of research computing requires reliable dataย on the carbon implications of resource use. To understand the current state of computing resource accounting, we conducted a landscape review of hardware-use accounting across the UK's national Digital Research Infrastructure, focussed on data needed for operational decision-making and sustainability reporting. In...

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  12. Anica Araneta (University of Cambridge)
    5/6/26, 9:40โ€ฏAM
    Talk

    One of the main challenges in adopting green software practices is the limited understanding and resources on the topic. Which components have the most emissions? How can researchers minimise their footprint and engage others? We argue that structured community-building is a critical yet underexplored mechanism for accelerating green computing adoption.

    This talk highlights recent...

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  13. Roman Dandoy (Universite de Liege (BE))
    5/6/26, 9:40โ€ฏAM
    Talk

    As the global energy demand of data centers continues to increase, reducing their environmental impacts has become a major challenge. This presentation provides an environmental assessment of the LHCb data centers using a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach, in line with CERNโ€™s sustainability objectives. The presentation will include the contribution of the different components of the data...

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  14. Dr Flaminia Zane (EMBL-EBI)
    5/6/26, 10:05โ€ฏAM
    Talk

    At the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), we support bioinformatics efforts through research, data services, and training. Training plays an essential role in shaping how biodata scientists design analyses, access data, and utilise computational infrastructure. An aim of EMBL-EBI Training is not only to teach bioinformatic tools, but also their responsible use.

    In this talk, we...

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  15. Romain Jacob (ETH Zurich)
    5/6/26, 10:05โ€ฏAM
    Talk

    It is encouraging to see more and more studies published about the environmental footprint of the ICT sector. Unfortunately, the outcomes of those studies are often misinterpreted. In fact, one can look at the footprint of a product or activity in many different ways which all make sense but serve different purposes. It is very easy to mistake one purpose for another and thus derive completely...

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  16. Caterina Doglioni (The University of Manchester (GB)), Tobias Fitschen (The University of Manchester (GB))
    5/6/26, 11:00โ€ฏAM
    Talk

    Scientific progress increasingly depends on powerful computing infrastructure, yet its environmental impacts across the full life cycle are often overlooked. This study evaluates the energy and resource efficiency of computing hardware and software within the Faculty of Science and Engineering (FSE) at the University of Manchester, informing the university's sustainability targets, including...

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  17. Dr Emily Wallis (United Kingdom Research and Innovation)
    5/6/26, 11:00โ€ฏAM
    Talk

    UK Research and Innovation is committed to achieving net zero emissions and to supporting environmental sustainability within the research it funds. This includes improving the sustainability of UKRIโ€™s Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) and use of digital resources. This presentation will outline UKRIโ€™s approach to achieving this, focussing on the action being taken in four key areas:...

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  18. Alex Owen (University of London (GB))
    5/6/26, 11:25โ€ฏAM
    Talk

    UK Research and Innovationโ€™s Digital Research Infrastructure (UKRI DRI) is inherently heterogeneous as the computing resources have grown organically and are specialised for various disciplines. Sustainability approaches for UKRI DRI must therefore span this heterogeneous landscape.

    The IRIS Carbon Audit SnapshoT (IRISCAST) project estimated the total carbon costs of 6 UKRI DRI services...

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  19. Loic Lannelongue (University of Cambridge)
    5/6/26, 11:25โ€ฏAM
    Talk

    In the face of growing environmental impacts of computing, there is a legitimate request from researchers to identify what they can do about it. Green DiSC is an open access sustainability certification framework enabling researchers, labs and institutions to tackle the environmental impacts of their computing activities. It will be an opportunity to discuss the scheme, demonstrate how it can...

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  20. Andreas Brunnert (Munich University of Applied Sciences HM)
    5/6/26, 11:50โ€ฏAM
    Talk

    Evaluating the energy consumption of software is inherently complex, as software itself does not consume energy directly; rather, it is the hardware on which it runs that does. Over the past few years, numerous tools and models have emerged to estimate energy consumption at various levels, such as servers, containers, processes, and transactions. When assessing the energy consumption of...

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  21. 5/6/26, 12:15โ€ฏPM
  22. Dr Sudha Ahuja (Queen Mary University of London)
    5/7/26, 11:45โ€ฏAM
    Talk

    Queen Mary University of London Data Center went through a major refurbishment with an upgrade of the facility with heat recovery technology, improving the energy efficiency while increasing capacity. The data center refurbishment ensured a long term home for GridPP cluster supporting WLCG workloads, and also for future projects such as HL-LHC, LSST, SKA. The cooling system uses hot aisle...

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  23. Jyoti Bhogal
    5/7/26, 11:45โ€ฏAM
    Talk

    There is a growing need for standardised approaches to report the environmental impacts of computational research. Funders now require such reporting, researchers are increasingly motivated to disclose the impact of their work, and journals lack clear guidelines to support this practice. The Green Algorithms project addresses this need by providing open-source tools to estimate the carbon...

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  24. Mr Mathieu Francois (Co-Founder & CEO, Antarctica)
    5/7/26, 12:10โ€ฏPM
    Talk

    The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into research workflows introduces a largely opaque layer of carbon intensity. Existing approaches to estimating AI energy consumption rely on time-based heuristics or static hardware profiling, which fail to capture the non-deterministic nature of generative inference. Variations in prompt design, quantization, and decoding strategies can lead...

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  25. JAIME IGLESIAS BLANCO (Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)), Mr Jaime Iglesias Blanco (CSIC)
    5/7/26, 12:10โ€ฏPM
    Talk

    Wattnet is an open-source platform for exploring the environmental footprint of electricity using open data. It provides real-time, historical, and internally generated 72-hour forecasts of carbon and water intensity for 60 European grid zones at 15-minute resolution, enabling data-driven, sustainable computing practices.

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  26. Lars Sowa (KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (DE))
    5/7/26, 12:35โ€ฏPM
    Talk

    As resource demands for High Energy Physics (HEP) and other data-intensive scientific realms reach unprecedented levels, the environmental impact of large-scale computing has has increasingly moved into the focus. Facilities now face the dual challenge of increasing resource pledges while continuously reducing their carbon footprint and total energy consumption.

    At the GridKa WLCG Tier-1...

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  27. Julia Paolini (EPFL)
    5/7/26, 12:35โ€ฏPM
    Talk

    Just like other fields, IT has an impact on the environment. To effectively reduce the impact, it must first be assessed so that realistic and efficient actions can be proposed. That is the reason why we propose a methodology that enables organizations that want to work on sustainability in IT to do so independently in a reproductible way. Using an LCA approach that takes into account IT...

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  28. 5/7/26, 1:00โ€ฏPM
  29. Dr Christina Bremer (University of Cambridge)
    5/7/26, 1:00โ€ฏPM
    Talk

    Computing carbon calculators enable researchers to quantify and visualise the environmental impacts of their computations, thereby identifying highโ€‘impact changes and exploring mitigation strategies. However, they currently have several limitations, including their limited performativity (i.e., they lead to limited behavioural changes) and their โ€œblack-boxedโ€ design in which calculation...

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  30. Jose Flix Molina (CIEMAT - Centro de Investigaciones Energรฉticas Medioambientales y Tec. (ES))
    5/7/26, 2:45โ€ฏPM
    Talk

    To mitigate the rising energy demands and COโ‚‚ emissions of large-scale scientific computing, this study evaluated energy-aware resource management at the WLCG PIC Tier-1 site. We initially used machine learning to optimize node drainage by routing short jobs during peak energy prices. However, this complex scheduling approach proved impractical, requiring constant retraining for fluctuating...

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  31. Dr Dwayne Spiteri (DESY)
    5/7/26, 3:10โ€ฏPM
    Talk

    Scientific computing contributes significantly to the CO2 footprint created by research conducted in ErUM (Research of Universe and Matter). In order to advance the environmental sustainability in this area the BMFTRโ€”funded SUSFECIT (Sustainable Federated Compute unfrastructures) research network has been established with the goal to contribute to developing a strategy and interlinked software...

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  32. Georgios Sarantakos (EPFL), Xavier Eric Ouvrard (EPFL EcoCloud)
    5/7/26, 3:35โ€ฏPM
    Talk

    At EPFL, the EcoCloud research center is at the forefront of both IT for sustainability and sustainability in IT. Among its flagships initiatives, HeatingBits โ€” funded by EPFL Solutions 4 Sustainabilityโ€” unites six EPFL laboratories and EcoCloud to develop and experimentally validate an holistic approach to datacenter design and operation optimized for minimal carbon footprint and seamless...

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