GreenDiSC Surveys

Computing is an essential component of modern research, and it comes with significant, but not always well-understood, environmental impacts. The climate crisis is urgent, and it is becoming increasingly apparent to scientists using computing that the resulting environmental effects should be taken into account and mitigated where possible.

The global carbon footprint of data centres is estimated at ~126 MT CO2e per year (mega tonnes of CO2-equivalent), equivalent to the entire US commercial aviation. It is not uncommon to have scientific computations reaching (hundreds of) tonnes of CO2e (e.g. Large Language Models over 500 T CO2e). For context, the IPCC target to keep global warming under 1.5C is around 2 tonnes per year and per person.

As part of the Green DiSC certification, we need to collect information on our use of computing infrastructure, data storage and hardware. For this purpose, the seminar will revolve around filling out the three surveys linked below.

Inventory of Computing Infrastructure (where do you compute and what’s most expensive): https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/LbjV7gvyuY

Inventory of Hardware: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/sWTHN8Rq3L

Inventory of Main Data Resources: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/XLKg2ktm6V

As preparation before the seminar, please fill in the Hardware Inventory ( https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/sWTHN8Rq3L ) before the seminar. To be able to trace devices, we need to have the Warwick inventory number, which is attached to the device.

On the day itself, please fill out the other two surveys.

The Inventory of Main Data Resources will require you to look at how much data you’ve used and delete data that you don’t need anymore (e.g., download and delete data from supercomputers, restructure how you store your data, empty Downloads, delete useless emails).

To see how much data is stored in a directory, use du -hs .

The Inventory of Computing Infrastructure will require you to look at where you calculate and identify roughly how many resources you need.

Finally, we would appreciate if you could also report how much CO2eq you have used during your summer projects for the calculations that you did on University of Warwick systems. Taskfarm, Avon, Blythe and Sulis have GreenAlgorithm4HPC installed for that purpose.

You can load it with:

module load GA4HPC

To estimate how much CO2eq you used in a time period (here between January and start of September 2025), run:

sh myCarbonFootprint.sh -S 2025-01-01 -E 2025-09-01

To see how much CO2eq a specific job of slurm-ID 4198761 ran, use:

sh myCarbonFootprint.sh --filterJobIDs 4198761

Similarly, you can estimate how much CO2eq you used on Archer2:

emissions --start=2024-11-01T00:00 --end=2026-09-01T00:00 --type=user <yourusername>

Any queries please contact Svenja Janke - Svenja.Janke@warwick.ac.uk

This form is closed and is no longer accepting any submissions. Thank you for your time.