Green Algorithms
High-performance computing (HPC) is an essential component of modern research, and it comes with significant, but not always well-understood, environmental impacts. The Green Algorithms project promotes more environmentally sustainable computational science by building tools for carbon footprint estimation, raising awareness, and driving change in the computational science community.
There are three main arms to the project which are research and tools, frameworks and training for sustainable research, and policy engagement. The online calculator is a widely used resource and has since been expanded for automatic monitoring of institutional computing facilities. On the other hand, the GREENER framework for sustainable data science provides guiding principles for the field. As a result, funders and policy makers are increasingly mindful of the sustainability of supported projects, including their computing components, which require careful inclusion of sustainability criteria.
By raising awareness about this issue, and providing resources for scientists to tackle it, the Green Algorithms project helps to ensure that the environmental impacts of the research produced by biomedical data scientists don’t outweigh its benefits to patients and society. The GREENER principles provide a framework to ensure this moving forward and to enable individual scientists and institution to consider environmental sustainability as a key part of computational research.