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Minisymposium Presentation
Walking the Walk: The ESM Community must be a Role Model in Energy Efficiency
Presenter
William Sawyer is a senior computational scientist at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), in Lugano, Switzerland, an autonomous branch of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH). He works in the Office of the Chief Technical Officer as a liaison between CSCS's customers – researchers from a variety of scientific disciplines, in particular from in Geosciences – and the system engineers and computer scientists who support current and emerging high performance computing solutions. He has more than 20 years of experience in numerical analysis for HPC, and has been active in research at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Maryland, as well as CSCS.
Description
Recently, in the face of mounting concern about climate change, the energy demand (and carbon footprint) of rapidly growing IT tech, such as cloud, cryptocurrencies, and generative AI has come under increasing scrutiny. Compared to these global IT trends, the carbon emissions of earth system modelling activities conducted by comparatively few scientists on HPC systems might seem like small potatoes. But as ESMs continue to grow larger, more complex and more data intensive the amount of energy needed to run them continues to increase. The climate community must lead by example by measuring, reporting and reducing these emissions. Measurement of energy consumption will require improved infrastructure instrumentation, the community-wide agreement on end-to-end metrics. Reporting will require institutional transparency and integrity. Realizing reductions through improved computational efficiency will be comparatively harder, and will require investment and innovation in algorithmic, software and computational technologies.