Collaborative Research: Workshop Series on Sustainable Computing

计算的进步仍然集中在不断提高的性能上。 虽然能量已经成为减轻热问题或增加移动的设备的电池寿命的感兴趣的度量，但是能量效率在很大程度上忽视了可持续性，特别是计算对地球的环境和能源的影响。 例如，虽然具体的环境成本（例如，尽管集成电路（IC）制造的碳排放（例如二氧化碳排放）经常超过其操作碳足迹，但这相对未知，或者在计算界中假定相反的情况是真实的。此外，在电子设备中使用稀有金属，如钽，钨和金，导致地球资源的不可避免的枯竭。 迫切需要考虑计算基础设施运行阶段能耗以外的因素，以真正应对整个计算生命周期中存在的碳和其他有害排放，以应对气候变化的生存威胁。 该项目提出了一系列面向社区的活动，最终在一个研讨会，以提高对可持续计算的这些因素在计算领域的研究人员的认识，并指定的挑战和潜在的可能的解决方案，以实现可持续计算，包括，但也超越了计算技术的操作阶段。 一个特别的目标将是促进跨学科研究人员之间的思想交流，这些学科不仅包括计算科学，还包括环境科学和政治科学，以确定计算基础设施设计和运营的可持续方法。该项目的新奇和智力价值在于确定需要弥合的知识差距，以真正使计算机可持续发展。 特别是，该项目将从来自不同领域的专家的一系列特邀演讲开始，这些专家对这些方面有着深刻的见解，这些方面最终影响着针对计算研究人员的计算资源的可持续性。 这些讲座将通过在线平台远程提供。在这些启发性的演讲之后，该项目将举办一个面对面的研讨会，将计算研究人员聚集在一起，讨论从演讲中吸取的经验教训，以及如何将这些想法纳入各种类型的计算设备中，从低功耗微型系统（如物联网（IoT）设备）到仓库规模的计算机（如数据中心）。通过这些活动，其目的是建立意识和战略，为计算系统创造一个可持续的未来。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

The advancement of computing remains focused on ever increasing performance. While energy has become a metric of interest for mitigating thermal issues or increasing battery life of mobile devices, energy efficiency has largely neglected sustainability and in particular, computing's impact on the environment and energy resources of the planet. For example, while embodied environmental costs (e.g., carbon emissions) of integrated-circuit (IC) manufacturing often exceed its operational carbon footprint, this is relatively unknown or the reverse is presumed to be true in the computing community. Furthermore, the use of rare metals such as tantalum, tungsten, and gold, in electronic equipment contribute to the inevitable exhaustion of the planet's resources. There is an urgent need to consider factors beyond operational-phase energy consumption of the computing infrastructure to truly combat carbon and other harmful emissions present during the full computing lifecycle to combat the existential threat of climate change. This project proposes a series of community oriented activities culminating in a workshop to both increase awareness among researchers in the domain of computing about these factors of sustainable computing and to specify the challenges and potential possible solutions to achieve sustainable computing including, but also beyond the operational phase of the computing technology. A particular goal will be to facilitate cross pollination of ideas among researchers across different disciplines encompassing not only computing sciences but also, environmental sciences and political sciences to identify sustainable methodologies for design and operation of computing infrastructure. The novelty and intellectual merit of this project is in identifying gaps in knowledge that need to be bridged to truly make computers sustainable. In particular, this project will start with a series of invited talks from experts from diverse fields with deep insights on these aspects that ultimately affect the sustainability of computing resources targeted at computing researchers. These talks will be delivered remotely with an online platform. Following these enlightening talks, this project will host an in-person workshop bringing computing researchers together to discuss the lessons learned from the talks and how these ideas can be incorporated in various types of computing devices from low power miniature systems such as Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices to warehouse-scale computers such as data centers. Through this activities, the intention is to create awareness and strategies to create a sustainable future for computing systems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.