A tutorial on carbon-aware hardware design space exploration — enabling architects to treat carbon as a first-order design target alongside performance, power, and energy.
Over the past two decades, the world has witnessed a dramatic rise in computing across data centers, mobile, and communication technologies. As of 2015, ICT accounts for up to 3% of global carbon emissions. As the demand for computing grows with new applications and platforms, so will its energy demand. Many technology companies have pledged to reduce their carbon footprints, and meeting those pledges requires immediate action from the systems and architecture community.
Enabling environmentally sustainable computing introduces unique challenges. Carbon emissions are shifting from being dominated by operational energy consumption to hardware manufacturing. Given these new challenges, enabling sustainable computing demands distinct solutions across the computing stack, hardware life cycles, and end-to-end systems.
ACT is the first-of-its-kind architectural carbon modeling tool. It enables computer architects to quantify the embodied carbon footprint of hardware during early design space exploration — allowing designers to consider carbon as a first-order optimization target alongside performance, power, and energy. This tutorial provides a holistic overview of the sustainability implications of modern computer systems, an overview of the ACT methodology, and hands-on demonstrations for using and extending ACT.
| Time | Topic | Presenter | Slides |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1:00–1:15 | Introduction to ACT | Udit Gupta | PDF · PPTX |
| 1:15–1:30 | Sustainable Computing: Motivation and Challenges | Udit Gupta | PDF · PPTX |
| 1:30–2:15 | Overview of ACT: An Architectural Carbon Modeling Tool | Udit Gupta | PDF · PPTX |
| 2:15–2:45 |
Demo: How to use ACT
|
Leo Han | PDF · PPTX |
| 2:45–3:00 |
Demo: How to extend ACT
|
Leo Han | PDF · PPTX |
| 3:00–3:30 | Coffee Break | ||
| 3:30–3:40 |
Invited: Designing Cloud Servers for Lower Carbon
|
Jaylen Wang Carnegie Mellon University |
|
| 3:40–3:50 |
Invited: Extending ACT for HI and FPGA Sustainable Computing
|
Chetan Choppal Arizona State University |
|
| 3:50–4:00 |
Invited: Carbon-Efficient Optimization for Computing Systems
|
Mariam Elgamal Harvard University |
|
| 4:00–4:10 |
Invited: Silicon Photonics for Sustainable AI
|
Farbin Fayza Boston University |
|
| 4:10–4:20 |
Invited: Energy/Carbon-Aware Evaluation of 3D IC Architectures with DCIM
|
Hyung Joon Byun Cornell Tech |
|
| 4:30–5:00 | Group Discussion | ||
| 5:00–5:05 | Closing Remarks | PDF · PPTX |
Cornell Tech
PhD student at Cornell Tech, advised by Udit Gupta. Research interests at the intersection of sustainability and computing: improving the sustainability of computing and using computing for sustainability applications. Current research focuses on providing fair, detailed, and accurate carbon footprint estimates for cloud users.
Cornell Tech · Assistant Professor
Assistant Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell Tech. Research spans sustainable computing, computer architecture, systems, and machine learning. Interested in designing systems and hardware to improve performance, efficiency, and environmental sustainability of emerging applications.
If you use ACT in your research, please cite:
@inproceedings{gupta2022act,
title={ACT: designing sustainable computer systems
with an architectural carbon modeling tool},
author={Gupta, Udit and Elgamal, Mariam and Hills, Gage
and Wei, Gu-Yeon and Lee, Hsien-Hsin S
and Brooks, David and Wu, Carole-Jean},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 49th Annual International
Symposium on Computer Architecture},
pages={784--799},
year={2022}
}