Environmental impact and social responsibility in large scale HPC services: ARCHER2 case study

A period of major change is coming up in the UK HPC landscape both in terms of the services that will be available and the focus on environmental impact and social responsibility of HPC services. In this presentation I will give an overview of ongoing work associated with the environmental sustainability and social responsibility of the UK National Supercomputing Service, ARCHER2. This will cover the understanding and quantification of emissions associated with a large-scale HPC installation, ideas for reuse of waste heat, and work to protect and improve the biodiversity associated with the ACF data centre. I will also set the quantitative emissions estimates for ARCHER2 in context by comparing to other sources of emissions. Understanding emission is the first step, to have a wider impact, HPC emissions data need be exposed to users of HPC systems. We will discuss approaches for this to allow researchers to make informed decisions on how they maximise the environmental efficiency of their HPC use. In addition to environmental impact, the presentation will touch on social responsibility aspects including staff wellbeing and wider outreach work. Although much of this work has been centred around ARCHER2, many of the lessons learned and approaches taken are applicable across Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) more generally, and provide a useful guide to which areas of environmental impact and social responsibility are well understood and where more work is needed by the community. A recording of this session is available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/vLsHOLHvMQE