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。虽然能源已成为缓解热问题或延长移动设备电池寿命的一个重要指标，但能源效率在很大程度上忽视了可持续性，特别是计算对地球环境和能源资源的影响。例如，虽然集成电路（IC）制造的隐含环境成本（例如碳排放）经常超过其运营碳足迹，但这是相对未知的，或者在计算社区中被认为是正确的。此外，在电子设备中使用稀有金属，如钽、钨和金，导致地球资源不可避免地枯竭。迫切需要考虑计算基础设施运行阶段能源消耗之外的因素，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，最终以研讨会结束，以提高计算领域研究人员对可持续计算的这些因素的认识，并详细说明实现可持续计算的挑战和潜在的可能解决方案，包括但也超出了计算技术的操作阶段。一个特别的目标将是促进不同学科的研究人员之间的思想交流，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行的可持续方法。这个项目的新颖性和智力价值在于确定了需要弥合的知识差距，以真正使计算机可持续发展。特别地，这个项目将以一系列邀请来自不同领域的专家的演讲开始，这些专家对最终影响计算资源可持续性的这些方面有深刻的见解，目标是计算研究人员。这些讲座将通过一个在线平台进行远程授课。在这些启发性的讲座之后，本项目将举办一个面对面的研讨会，让计算研究人员聚集在一起，讨论从讲座中吸取的经验教训，以及如何将这些想法纳入各种类型的计算设备，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，目的是创造意识和策略，为计算系统创造一个可持续的未来。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并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，被认为值得支持。

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.