ACT: Designing Sustainable Computer Systems With An Architectural Carbon Modeling Tool

Udit Gupta, Mariam Elgamal, Gage Hills, Gu Yeon Wei, Hsien Hsin S. Lee, David Brooks, Carole Jean Wu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

25 Scopus citations

Abstract

Given the performance and efciency optimizations realized by the computer systems and architecture community over the last decades, the dominating source of computing's carbon footprint is shifting from operational emissions to embodied emissions. These embodied emissions owe to hardware manufacturing and infrastructure-related activities. Despite the rising embodied emissions, there is a distinct lack of architectural modeling tools to quantify and optimize the end-to-end carbon footprint of computing. This work proposes ACT, an architectural carbon footprint modeling framework, to enable carbon characterization and sustainability-driven early design space exploration. Using ACT we demonstrate optimizing hardware for carbon yields distinct solutions compared to optimizing for performance and efciency. We construct use cases, based on the three tenets of sustainable design-Reduce, Reuse, Recycle-to highlight future methods that enable strong performance and efciency scaling in an environmentally sustainable manner.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationISCA 2022 - Proceedings of the 49th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages784-799
Number of pages16
ISBN (Electronic)9781450386104
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 18 2022
Event49th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Computer Architecture, ISCA 2022 - New York, United States
Duration: Jun 18 2022Jun 22 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Symposium on Computer Architecture
ISSN (Print)1063-6897

Conference

Conference49th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Computer Architecture, ISCA 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew York
Period6/18/226/22/22

Keywords

  • Computer Architecture
  • Energy
  • Manufacturing
  • Mobile
  • Sustainable computing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Hardware and Architecture

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'ACT: Designing Sustainable Computer Systems With An Architectural Carbon Modeling Tool'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this