Green HPC

Really interesting article below from Brent about calculating sustainability metrics for public cloud.

Calculating Sustainability Metrics in a Public Cloud

In the past few years, there has been tremendous growth in interest in environmental sustainability. Whether it is reusable water bottles…

MediumBrent Segner

Given HPC workloads can spin up 30,000 vCPUs just for giggles to test a new model, the environmental impact is, shall we say, significant. 

I’ve previously wondered, what if the cloud orchestration/ optimisation for selecting VMs could dynamically optimise not only based on cost and performance but also carbon dioxide emissions or power usage? 

If the data was available (via an API from the cloud provider ideally!), optimising VM instance type selection would be no more difficult than optimising for price. At which point, it just becomes a decision for the HPC customer as to what they wish to optimise for. 

The dataset referred to in the article is a great start. Anyone know if similar is available for Azure and GCP?