GreenDIGIT works with RIs to lower the environmental impact of their digital services
Lowering the environmental impact of digital services and technologies has to become a priority for both the operation of existing digital services and the design of future digital infrastructures. Indeed, digital infrastructures are responsible for 5 to 9 % of the world’s total electricity use and more than 2% of global emissions. Within the European Union, data centres accounted for 2,7 % of electricity demand in 2018 and will reach 3,21 % by 2030 if development continues on the current trajectory.
GreenDIGIT, funded in the Horizon Europe ‘New Technologies for Research Infrastructures’ (INFRA-TECH) programme, runs between 2024-2026 to pilot and validate various technical and non-technical solutions that Research Infrastructures can adopt to lower the environmental impact of their digital services. GreenDIGIT brings together four digital RIs: EGI, SLICES, SoBigData and EBRAINS. These bring expertise across the whole spectrum of digital services, from IoT to networks, data repositories and compute centres. Thanks to the contribution of the RIs, GreenDIGIT will be able to enable the whole European RI landscape to lower its environmental impact related to the provisioning or consumption of digital services. GreenDIGIT focuses on three areas:
- Policy and Governance: Establishing and providing frameworks for measuring and managing the environmental impact of digital services through the entire RI lifecycle.
- Resource Efficiency: Develop software tools, frameworks and infrastructures that support digital service providers and users in measuring and lowering their environmental impact through optimised operation and consumption.
- Skills and Collaboration: Run community building and training programmes for RI communities to increase the general understanding, specific skills and collaboration about environmental impact lowering approaches and technologies.
EGI contributes to the project with EGI Federation partners, such as CESNET (Czech Republic), CNRS (France), CSIC (Spain), and SZTAKI (Hungary), who work on several technical activities in the project, as described in the following:
- Define and set up a metrics collection infrastructure to support RIs in collecting, aggregating and analysing environmental impact-related metrics about digital services.
- Establish a federated, digital scientific experiment (analysis) reproducibility system to support RIs in the reusing analysis results, minimising the need for re-executing calculations that have been already performed.
- Expand several EGI Services, such as EGI Workload Manager (DIRAC technology), the EGI Notebooks service (JupyterHub technology) - and the AI4EOSC frameworks with intelligent brokering capabilities that consider the environmental footprint of compute cycles during resource selection.
- Research, implement and validate a data centre automation service that monitors the use of computers, predicts incoming user requests then decides about switching on/off unused hardware to lower energy consumption without causing Quality-of-Service errors towards the users.
- Research, implement and validate job schedulers that can choose the most suitable type of hardware resources and the most suitable time for job execution considering the environmental impact, the expected time of completion and the carbon content of the energy used by compute centres.
These, and the other GreenDIGIT solutions will contribute to EGI’s ambition to lower its environmental footprint, without degrading or jeopardising its impact on science.
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