The environmental impact, carbon emissions and sustainability of computing in the ATLAS experiment
ATLAS, a general-purpose experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), operates a large internationally-distributed computing infrastructure, including over $10^6$ TB of managed data on disk and tape and almost one million simultaneously running CPU cores. Upgrades for the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) will increase the required computing resources by a factor of 3-4 by the beginning of the 2030s, and by an order of magnitude before the conclusion of data taking at the beginning of the 2040s. These resources are spread over around 100 computing sites worldwide. Efforts are underway within the experiment to evaluate and mitigate various aspects of the environmental impact of the sites, with the additional long-term goal of making recommendations to the sites that will significantly reduce the total expected environmental impact in the HL-LHC era. These efforts take several forms: building awareness in the experiment community, adjusting aspects of the computing policy, and modifications of data center configurations, either in ways that take advantage of particular features of ATLAS workloads or in generic ways that reduce the environmental impact of the computing resources. This paper describes the ongoing investigations and approaches that have already provided useful, and actionable outcomes that can be implemented today.
Institutions
- Université Paris Cité (FR)
- Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives (FR)
- Laboratoire d’Annecy de Physique des Particules (FR)
- Laboratoire AstroParticule et Cosmologie (FR)
- Centre de physique des particules de Marseille (FR)
- Laboratoire de Physique Nucléaire et de Hautes Énergies (FR)
- CEA Paris-Saclay (FR)
- Laboratoire de Physique des 2 Infinis Irène Joliot-Curie (FR)
- Laboratoire de Physique Subatomique et de Cosmologie (FR)
- Institut de Recherche sur les Lois Fondamentales de l'Univers (FR)
- Laboratoire des 2 Infinis Toulouse (FR)
Publication Details
- Journal
- DESY Publication Database (PUBDB) (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron)
- Published
- 2025-01-01
- Primary Topic
- Green IT and Sustainability
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Science Foundation
- U.S. Department of Energy
- Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung
- Canarie
- TRIUMF
- CERN
- UK Research and Innovation
- Türkiye Enerji, Nükleer ve Maden Araştırma Kurumu
- European Commission
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche
- Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology
- Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung
- Danmarks Grundforskningsfond
- Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- Ministerstvo Školství, Mládeže a Tělovýchovy
- Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung
- Austrian Science Fund
- Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek
- Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Wirtschaft
- Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico
- Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
- Ministerstwo Edukacji i Nauki
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
- Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique et Technique
- Forskningsrådet om Hälsa, Arbetsliv och Välfärd
- Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo
- National Science and Technology Council
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- Science and Technology Facilities Council
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
- Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia
- Agencia Nacional de Promoción Científica y Tecnológica
- British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund
- European Regional Development Fund
- Agencia Estatal de Investigación
- Institut National de Physique Nucléaire et de Physique des Particules
- H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions