When it comes to climate change, carbon emission control is critical.
Prateek Sharma , assistant professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, sees potential trouble coming from the computer industry, a major source of carbon emissions, and seeks to address it now.
Emissions continue to rise even though the use of renewable energy is increasing in electrical grids and data centers. Effectively harnessing it is challenging for software applications because of its intermittency and geographical variations.
Sharma's National Science Foundation CAREER proposal -- “Green Functions as a Service: Towards Sustainable and Efficient Distributed Computing Infrastructure” – will be a key step toward making widely used cloud applications “greener.”
“It will provide a common platform for carbon and latency optimized execution of a wide range of cloud applications and digital services, such as AI, scientific computing, IoT, and data analytics,” he said. “Serverless computing is fast becoming the dominant paradigm to develop and deploy cloud applications, and this proposal seeks to reduce the carbon footprint of serverless applications.”
The “Green Function as a Service” software platform will use recent advances in AI for carbon measurement and optimization, such that applications run on the most suitable geographic location with adequate supply of renewable energy, and reduce the total carbon footprint of cloud-based applications.
How big is the current carbon footprint of computer applications? It’s estimated that it contributes to 2 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, which is equal to all commercial aviation. It also contributes to 4 percent of the world’s electricity consumption.
Given the rapid growth of technologies such as large AI models (such as ChatGPT), by 2030, computing could total between 7 and 20 percent of the world’s electricity production.
“Cloud computing, which provides the computational fuel for these applications, must be decarbonized and made sustainable in order to address the climate crisis,” Sharma said. “How do we design distributed computing infrastructure with carbon as the first-order system-wide objective?”
Sharma’s proposal addresses that with a multi-faceted research and education plan that will introduce key sustainability principles to system design and teaching that will contribute to a sustainable digital world.
“I am excited by Prateek’s integrated research and education plan which will motivate and train the next generation of students to think of and optimize the sustainability of computing applications” said Beth Plale, chair of the Intelligent Systems Engineering Department. “The project's policy gyms will provide a platform and incentives to teach students to develop new energy and carbon minimization algorithms.”
The National Science Foundation is an independent federal agency that supports science and engineering in all 50 U.S. states as well as U.S. territories.
The CAREER program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers prestigious awards in support of early career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education, and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.