Minimizing CO2 Emissions in a Computing World

The impact of Parallel Computing Infrastructures (PCI) on energy consumption and CO₂ emissions worldwide can no longer be ignored. So far, most actions taken have focused on energy efficiency of PCI´s underlying hardware, direct reduction of CO₂ emissions, or user policies targeted to optimize hardware usage and consequently ensure that most CO₂ emissions are justified, thereby minimizing the impact of computer infrastructures on global warming. Here, we discuss a simple software implementation designed to ensure that CO₂ emissions by PCI´s take place on-demand, without requiring (large) group policy strategies to be implemented. Adoption of this simple software in two computer clusters with approximately 100 cores each has lead to the total estimated energy savings in one year equivalent to 5 tons in CO₂ emissions.