Environment Variables

👉 State of Green Software Survey - click this link to access! 👈

Environment Variables is back! Chris Adams hosts our Green Networks focused episode and he is joined by Eve Schooler, Principal Engineer and Director of Emerging IoT Networks at Intel and Romain Jacob of ETH Zurich. They discuss how can we reduce the energy produced by networks? How could we leverage current research to make the internet more energy efficient?

Learn more about our guests:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website
• Romain Jacob: Website / Twitter
• Eve Schooler: Website / LinkedIn

Episode resources:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter 

Talks & Events:

• Talk: The Internet of tomorrow must sleep more and grow old by Romain Jacob and Laurent Vanbever.
• Event: Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Hackathon and Codesprint London (IETF 115)

Papers:

• Paper: The Internet of tomorrow must sleep more and grow old for Hot Carbon by Romain Jacob and Laurent Vanbever.
• Paper: Internet Backbones in Space by Giacomo Giullari, Tobias Klenze, Markus Legner, David Basin, Adrian Perrig and Ankit Singla.
• Paper: ITU GHG Recommendations for the ICT Sector
• Paper: Toward Carbon-Aware Networking by Noa Zilberman, Eve M. Schooler, Uri Cummings, Rajit Manohar, Dawn Nafus, Robert Soulé and Rick Taylor.
• Paper: Greening of the Internet by Maruti Gupta and Suresh Singh.
• Paper: Approaches to calculating network / website energy and carbon by David Mytton.

  
  

Open Source Projects:

• The Watttime API
• Electricity Map API
• The Green Software Foundation Carbon Aware SDK - the SDK offered by the Green Software Foundation.
• Grid Intensity Go - a Golang CLI and library, for use in projects to extend them for carbon awareness.
• CO2.js
• The Green Web Foundation IP-2-carbon-intensity API

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!

Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

Transcript Below:
Romain Jacob: In many internet service provider networks. So kind of the edge of the internet, where we have strong, seasonal patterns into traffic, they are allowing fruits. There are many of those small networks. So the benefit you can get there actually add up pretty quickly. And if they, if they don't seem.

Interesting. If you look at a single network, if you apply those principles everywhere, you can achieve very large effect. And that's something, every network operator should, should have a look at if only to reduce their energy.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discussed the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.

I'm your host, Chris Adams.

Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables. The podcast about green software. I'm Chris Adams, your host today, I'm filling in for Asim Hussain. And on this episode, I am joined by Eve schooler of Intel. Hi

Eve Schooler: Hi.

Chris Adams: Eve and Hama, Jacob of et Zurich in Switzerland.

Romain Jacob: Hello, everybody.

Chris Adams: And today we're gonna discuss the levers available to us for greener networking.

Now, if we go by the figures from the international energy agency, data networks used around 250 terror hours of electricity in 2019. And while we don't have the figures yet for 2022. This same agency is projecting a estimate of around 270 terawatts to be used by the end of this year, which for context is more than the entire electricity usage of Germany, the fourth largest economy in the world, this results in a significant environmental impact.

And thankfully, we'll be talking with some people who've been spending a lot of time thinking about where the biggest levers are to do something about this in the context of the climate crisis. And they'll be sharing their research on how we can end up with greener more sustainable networking. But before, before we dive into the specifics, let's do a quick round of intros.

So maybe you can introduce yourself and your work at Intel.

Eve Schooler: Hi, thank you for inviting me. I am a principal engineer and I'm a director of emerging IOT networks at Intel. And my current work focuses on evolving the internet toward a sustainable edge to cloud infrastructure. My background in expertise is primarily in networking and distributed systems. And although I've spent much of my career in industrial research, I currently straddle a business unit at Intel called the network and edge business unit.

And as well as the corporate strategy office, where I'm responsible for sustainability, innovation and standard. And I'd say that something that's really colored my experiences that I've spent much of my career heavily involved in internet standards and standards bodies, such as N and the I E TF, which is the internet engineering task force.

Where earlier in my career, I developed control protocols for internet telephony and multime...

In this episode of Environment Variables Chris Adams is joined by Colleen Josephson of VMWare, Philipp Wiesner of TU Berlin and Sara Bergman of Microsoft as they discuss the opportunities with making first carbon aware and then carbon intelligent computing. Variability, curtailment, disaggregation, 5G, 6G (!), delay-tolerant networks, intermittent computing, IoT and even a short segue about Raspberry Pi’s all make an appearance in this action-packed episode!

Learn more about our guests:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website
• Sara Bergman: LinkedIn / Twitter
• Colleen Josephson: Twitter / Website
• Philipp Wiesner: Twitter 

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!
• Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

Episode resources:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter 

Talks & Events:

• Talk:  Breaking the Barriers of Stranded Energy through Multi-cloud and Federated Data Centers by Colleen Josephson, Zhelong Pan, Ben Pfaff and Victor Firoiu.
• Talk: Towards a Fossil Free Internet by Chris Adams.
• Talk: The Internet of tomorrow must sleep more and grow old by Romain Jacob and Laurent Vanbever.
• Event: Hot Carbon at UC San Diego 2022.
• Event: Solar Protocol Hackathon - August 14 2022.

Papers:

• Paper: The Sky is not the limit: untapped opportunities for Green Computing for Hot Carbon by Colleen Josephson, Zhelong Pan, Ben Pfaff and Victor Firoiu.
• Paper: Architecture of a Junkyard Datacenter by Jennifer Switzer, Ryan Kastner and Pat Pannuto.
• Paper: Cucumber: Renewable-Aware Admission Control for Delay-Tolerant Cloud and Edge Workloads by Philipp Wiesner, Dominik Scheinert, Thorsten Wittkopp, Lauritz Thamsen and Odej Kao.
• Paper: Let's Wait Awhile: How Temporal Workload Shifting Can Reduce Carbon Emissions in the Cloud by Philipp Wiesner, Ilja Behnke, Dominik Scheinert, Kordian Gontarska and Lauritz Thamsen.
• Paper: The Internet of tomorrow must sleep more and grow old for Hot Carbon by Romain Jacob and Laurent Vanbever.
• Paper: Internet Backbones in Space by Giacomo Giullari, Tobias Klenze, Markus Legner, David Basin, Adrian Perrig and Ankit Singla.

Open Source Projects:

• The Green Software Foundation Carbon Aware SDK - the SDK offered by the Green Software Foundation.
• Grid Intensity Go - a Golang CLI and library, for use in projects to extend them for carbon awareness.
• The carbon aware branch of Nomad - Nomad, the popular scheduler by Hashicorp has an experimental carbon aware branch.
• Carbon aware autoscaler in KEDA for Kubernetes - The issue mentioned in the podcast for extending Kubernetes. 

Blog Posts & Articles: 

• Blog: Carbon aware autoscaler in KEDA for Kubernetes - The issue mentioned in the podcast for extending Kubernetes by Bill Johnson (Azure SRE).
• Blog: Annotating jobs with AsyncAPI to be more amenable to carbon intelligent architecture patterns by Ismael Velasco.
• Article: The Dirty Carbon Secret Behind Solid State Memory Drives | Discover Magazine 
• Article: Intermittent Computing in Satellites: Satellite Designed at CMU Launches into Low-Earth Orbit by SpaceRef magazine.
• Article: A carbon aware internet by Chris Adams for Branch Magazine.
• Blog: Nasa’s work on Delay Tolerant Networks
• Blog: SCION and carbon aware networking the World Economic Forum.
• Blog: Sustainable 6G Efforts by Colleen Josephson.
• Blog: VMware sustainable digital infrastructure collaborations by VMWare.  

Transcript Below:
Philipp Wiesner: So I think we're only touching on the actual potential of how much flexibility there is in many workloads. And I think this is also one of the biggest challenges in the entire field, how to identify opportunities for flexibility, and then especially how to make schedulers aware of these opportunities.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discussed the latest news and events surrounding green. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.

I'm your host, Chris Adams.

Okay. Welcome to Environment Variables. On this episode, I'm joined by Colleen Josephson of VMware, S...

👉 State of Green Software Survey - click this link to access! 👈

The future of Green Software lies in education. In this episode host Chris Adams is joined by Luis Cruz of TU Delft and Sara Bergman of Microsoft as they discuss how to teach and learn to make Green Software. With Luis’ unique insight as a professor, he is able to bring us up to date with pedagogical approaches that are laying the groundwork for future software engineers.

Learn more about our guests:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website
• Sara Bergman: LinkedIn / Twitter
• Luis Cruz: LinkedIn / Twitter / Website (with course info).

Episode resources:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter 
• Luis’ open source course on sustainable software engineering, taught at TU Delft
• Sara’s Paper on performance characteristics of Blockchains and other distributed consensus mechanisms

People to follow doing relevant work in this field:

• Person: Simin Nadjm-Tehrani - IEEE Xplore Author Profile
• Person: Hannah Smith: Educator - Hannah Smith (opcan.co.uk)
• Person: Sabine Canditt and her book Small steps. Large... by Sabine Canditt
• Person: Patricia Lago: Full Professor at VUAmsterdam.
• Person: Elina Eriksson: Associate Professor KTH. 
• Person: Mikael Asplund: Linköping University.
• Person: Sandra Pallier - ClimateAction.tech organiser and designer at Microsoft.
• Person: Colleen Josephson - VM Ware. Collen’s recent talk and paper at ACM Energy.
• Person: Bilge Acun - Facebook/Meta - See Carbon Explorer on github.

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!
• Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

Transcript Below:
Luis Cruz: If you want to change the generation of software engineers, you need to change the mindset of their leaders and you need to start earlier. And the obvious answer for that is to include green software as part of our university courses.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discussed the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software. I'm your host, Chris Adams. Welcome to Environment Variables. 

My name's Chris Adams. And on this episode, I am joined by Sara Bergman of Microsoft and Luis Cruz of TU Delft. That's technical university of Delft. We'll be talking about how people teach and learn to make green software. Before we dive in though, maybe it's time for a quick round of introductions.

My name is Chris Adams. I am the chair of the Green Software Foundation policy group, and I'm also the executive director of the Green Web Foundation, where we work towards an entirely fossil for internet by 2030, Luis. Would you be so kind as to introduce yourself, then we'll give Sara a chance to explain, introduce herself and see what she, and what she does.

Luis Cruz: Sure thing. Hello everyone. My name is Luis Cruz, and I'm an assistant professor at the software engineering group at TU Delft. And there we do research and educate the next generation of software developers. and our main topics, we've overrun, software testing, software deducting, and of course also about green software, how to build energy efficient software.

So most of my time is devoted on doing research on green software, green AI, sustainable software engineering, and of course also about educating and finally about managing because when we have a lot of people, we also have to manage. People and students are also part of these managing and management load that we have at the universities, like to you, Chris.

Chris Adams: Luis. And, uh, Sara, one of our recurring hosts. Why don't you introduce yourself for some of the folks who may not have heard the previous episodes?

Sara Bergman: Great. Thanks. Always great to be back on the podcast. My name is Sara Bergman. I am a software engineer at Microsoft where I work in M 365 or with M 365 products. And in the Green Software Foundation, I'm the chair of the writer's project, where we deal with some of our written materials, like the articles we produce and the newsletter that you're all hopefully subscribed to.

Chris Adams: Okay, thank you, Sara. And just for the record, while you brought that up, if someone did want to subscribe to the newsletter and find out about this through regular and. Updates, where would they be going to find out such a thing?

Sara Bergman: you go to ...

This episode is taken from a recent panel discussion from the Green Software Foundation’s Global Summit of 2022. EV regulars, Chris Adams and Asim Hussain are joined by Anne Currie, Chris Lloyd-Jones and Elise Zelechowski as they discuss Accessibility and Green Software. What’s driving interest in Green Software? What ESG principles are being adopted by companies and what is needed to drive accountability and accessibility in this sphere? Where does the main driver for Green Software come from within an organisation?

Learn more about our guests:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website
• Anne Currie: LinkedIn / Website 
• Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / Twitter
• Chris Lloyd-Jones: LinkedIn / Twitter
• Elise Zelechowski: LinkedIn 

Episode resources:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter 
• Green Software Foundation Summit
• The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!
• Policy: Blaue Engel / Blue Angel

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

Transcription below:

Elise Zelechowski: I am excited about the Green Software Foundation for the very reason that I think this is about a movement of technologists who are really sort of coming up with innovative creative ways to address this problem. And so the way we need to take this forward is get CIOs to the table and say, now, how do we sort of come together and think about mutual benefit?

How do we sort of make this a systems approach within the organization to tackle all the different parts that we need to tackle?

Asim Hussain: Hello and welcome to Environment Variables. Brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discussed the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software and your host Asim Hussain.

Chris Skipper: Hey everyone. Chris, the producer of Environment Variables here with a quick note to say that the following episode of the podcast was taken from a panel discussion from the recent Green Software Foundation global summit. If you would like to hear and see an unfiltered raw version of this discussion, head on over to our YouTube channel and look for the video entitled GSF global summit closing ceremony, 2022.

In fact, I'll do you one better and add a link below in the show notes of the podcast. So head there, click the link and you can check out not only that discussion, but all the other episodes of the Environment Variables podcast too. Now on with the show.

Asim Hussain: Welcome, my name Is Asim Hussain and I'm excited today to host a panel with guests from the Green Software Foundation.

Chris Lloyd-Jones: I'm Chris Lloyd-Jones.

Chris Adams: Hi there. My name's Chris Adams. Oh, sorry, Anne.

Anne Currie: hi, I'm Anne Currie.

Elise Zelechowski: Hi, Elise Zelechowski.

Asim Hussain: Awesome. I've got some wonderful, uh, interesting questions, hopefully for all of you. And I'd love to hear your opinions. Very interesting topics around green software. My first question is, you know, what's driving, I personally have experienced a lot more interest in this space in kind of the last year, at the very least.

What do you, think's driving interest in green software in, across the industry, Chris Lloyd-Jones. Why don't you go ahead with that one.

Chris Lloyd-Jones: So for me, I think it's the growing understanding from individuals that our way of life needs to be greener, to be sustainable and be resilient. And now there's a lot of talk from governments and around setting targets and policies, and those are very important, but green software lets every individual make an impact and make a difference, which I think is a differentiator from all the other initiatives that are going.

Asim Hussain: Mm. Yeah, really good point. I, I, I feel there's a ground spell movement across the world as well. Yes. Elise, what's your, what's your thoughts on that? On that question?

Elise Zelechowski: I would, I would echo that and just say, I mean, I think that technologists today are, are, are growing up with more and more real sort of impacts from climate change. They're seeing them manifested in ways that are really impacting how they experience the world around them and how they think about their future.

And organizations like the Green Software Foundation that really provide a forum to take action and to feel like you have agency to really make a change and sort of really not just make a change broadly, but make a change in what you're building every day really gives people a sense of the power to change.

And I think that that is one of the, the most exciting things about the, the Green Software Foundation. I also just think that, you know, Organizations are increasingly adopting ESG frameworks. I think there's more and more accountability expectations around that. And of course, organizations that, that have an outsized emissions footprint from their it right, are gonna be looking at green software as one of the big opportunities to make an impact.

Asim Hussain: Wonderful that, that that's. Yeah, that's definitely aligned to my thinking as well. So given the fact that organizations. You know, they're interested in green software, but they need to adopt, you know, processes, principles, patterns of, of engineering in order to greenify their, their software and reduce the emissions of software, what what's needed in your mind for organizations to, to adopt these patterns and principles, Chris Adams.

What's your thoughts in that area?

Chris Adams: So what really, our big, big one, right...

This week Asim Hussain and Chris Adams are joined by Sara Bergman of Microsoft and Henry Richardson of Wattime.org to discuss the current global surge in oil and gas prices. Why is  the price of oil and gas so damn high at the moment?  How does intermittency influence the price surge? Are high gas prices actually good for society as a whole? How does Green Software come into play? All this including a wrap-up of the Green Software Foundation Summit.

Learn more about our guests:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website
• Sara Bergman: LinkedIn / Twitter
• Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / Twitter
• Henry Richardson: LinkedIn / Website

Episode resources:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter 
• Green Software Foundation Summit
• Event: RIPE 84
• Organisation: The Rocky Mountain Institute
• Article: From Deep Crisis, Profound Change by Kingsmill Bond, Amory Lovins, Oleksiy Tatarenko, Jules Kortenhorst & Sam Butler-Sloss. 
• Article: Understanding Energy Market Trends At The Layer Below the Internet Stack by the Green Software Foundation.
• Podcast: The Climate Fix: Transitioning heating to hydrogen w/ Professor Averil Macdonald OBE
• Resource: Carbon Aware SDK by the Green Software Foundation.
• Book: Apocalypse Never by Michael Schellenberger

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

Transcription below:
Chris Adams: We kind of do incentivize publicly traded companies like legally fiduciary responsibility wise to act a little bit like sociopaths. So we need to like hack that and do something about that. And like, this feels like maybe one way that you do need to resort to, but probably not the only one it's also useful to maybe talk about values.

Because, well, I know I respond to values more than most people, and there's lots of research, which says lead with values, but follow up with numbers, if you're gonna try and get any of these changes to actually be implemented or to see any change within an organization.

Asim Hussain: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.

I'm your host. Asim Hussain.

Chris Adams: So my name's Chris Adams, I'm the executive director of the green web foundation.

Asim Hussain: My name's Asim Hussain. I'm the executive director of the green software foundation and the green cloud advocacy lead at Microsoft.

Sara Bergman: My name is Sara Bergman. I am a software engineer at Microsoft. I'm the chair of the writer's project at the green software found.

Henry Richardson: I'm Henry Richardson, an analyst at WattTime and also the chair of the specifications working group at the green software foundation.

Chris Adams: Okay. So I suppose Asim, I figured we would spend the time today doing a brief recap from the GSF summit here. And I figured that would be a relatively easy thing to talk about because there have been like how many hours of programming now from various people over the last month has seen.

Asim Hussain: I haven't got the stats yet, but there's quite a lot. There's quite a lot. I mean, it's 27, no, actually 20, 27 regions and 28 events cuz one region had two events over two days. So yeah, a lot of, a lot of people have been connecting and sitting and chatting and talking about green software. , which is just really incredible.

Actually, I, you know, I, everybody was just working so, so hard to get the summit together, that to actually just sit there for a second and think that, wow, you know, people all around the world are now sitting down and having conversations about this topic. I don't know. It was really inspiring. One of my hopes for this podcast has always been like, just getting a bunch of people on and just talking about something that's happened recently that's of interest.

And I think all of us kind of can have opinions on, on this topic. So I don't know. I mean, other than the foundation, other than the summit, because I think that Henry only took part in some of it and, and Sarah. Got hers canceled and I had a fraternity, so I kind of just checked out for most of it as well.

so I didn't really like doing much. Is there another topic, like something happening in the news recently that, that

Chris Adams: shit. There's loads. So in Europe you've seen a whole shift. This you've seen a kinda landmark rolling on things like right to. Hardware efficiency in that basically the Europe has decided to standardize on USBC for any kind of devices or devices for charging now. Right. So that totally affects that part of the S uh, of the se.

All right, that's gonna have a meaningful impact impact. There also, you've seen a. Some similar model legislation come through on the U on the us level. Now that's been put forward to actually say, well, if they can do it, why can't we do it? So you may end up with the Brussels effect that was being referred to in the previous podcast about, well, okay, you set a decent default and th...

This week Chris Adams takes over the reins from Asim Hussain to discuss how does artificial intelligence and machine learning impact climate change. He is joined by Will Buchanan of Azure ML (Microsoft), Abhishek Gupta; the chair of the Standards Working Group for the Green Software Foundation and Lynn Kaack; assistant professor at the Hertie School in Berlin. They discuss boundaries, Jevon’s paradox, the EU AI Act, inferencing and supply us with a plethora of materials regarding ML and AI and the climate!

Learn more about our guests:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website
• Will Buchanan: LinkedIn
• Abhishek Gupta: LinkedIn
• Lynn Kaack: LinkedIn / Latest Paper

Episode resources:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter 
• Green Software Foundation Summit
• Project: Pachama
• Project: This Climate Does Not Exist
• Legislation: The EU AI Act
• Paper: The Green AI Movement
• GitHub: Dynamic Batch Inferencing - Taylor Prewitt & Ji Hoon Kang of UW
• GitHub: NVIDIA Triton server on AzureML & Model Analyzer

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

Transcript Below:

Abhishek Gupta: We're not just doing all of this accounting to produce reports and to, you know, spill ink, but it's to concretely drive change in behavior. And this was coming from folks who are a part of the standards working group, including will and myself who are practitioners who are itching to get something that helps this change.

Our behavior change our team's behaviors when it comes to building greener software.

Asim Hussain: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.

I'm your host. Assim Hussain.

Chris Adams: Hello there and welcome to the Environment Variables podcast. The podcast about green software. I'm Chris Adams filling in for Asim Hussain, the regular host while he's on paternity leave, with a brand new baby! I met Asim on climateaction.tech, an online community for climate aware, techies. And I work for the green web foundation where we work towards a fossil free internet by 2030, as well as working as the co-chair for the green software foundations policy group.

Today, we're talking about climate change, AI and green software, and I'm joined by Lynn, Will and Abhishek.

Will Buchanan: Thanks for having me. My name is will. I'm a product manager on the Azure machine learning team. I'm also a member of the green software foundation standards and innovation working group within Microsoft. I foster the green AI community, which now has a few hundred members and I'm also a climate activist.

That's focused on pragmatic solutions to complex environmental issues. Recently I shipped energy consumption metrics within Azure machine learning, and we are about to publish a paper titled measuring carbon intensity of AI in cloud instances, which I think we'll touch on today.

Abhishek Gupta: Well, thanks for having me. I'm Abhishek Gupta, I'm the founder and principal researcher at the Montreal ethics Institute. I also work as a senior responsible AI leader and expert at the Boston consulting group, BCG and I serve as the chair for the standards working group at the Green Software Foundation. So I've got a few hats on there.

Most of my work. As it relates to what we're gonna talk about. Runs at the intersection of responsible AI and green software in particular what's offer interest to me is looking at how the intersections of social responsibility, the environmental impacts of software systems in particular AI systems.

Can be thought about when we're looking to make a positive impact on the world while using technology in a responsible fashion. I also, as a part of the green software foundation, help through the standards working group, come up with the software carbon intensity specification, where we are trying to create an actionable way for developers and consumers or software systems to better assess and, and mitigate the environmental impacts of their work.

Chris Adams: Okay. And Lynn last but not least joining us from Berlin. Thank you very much for joining us.

Lynn Kaack: Yeah, thank you so much. I am an assistant professor at a policy school, public policy school called Hertie School in Berlin. And I am also a co-founder and a chair of an organization called climate change. AI. And with climate change AI, we facilitate work at the intersection of machine learning and different kinds of climate domains, focusing on climate change, mitigation and adaptation.

And in my work, in my research, I am looking at how we can use machine learning as a tool to address different problems related to energy and climate policy. And I'm also interested in the policy of AI and climate. And today, actually, since we're talking about papers, I have a paper coming up that is called aligning artificial intelligence with climate change mitigation, where we look at the different impacts from machine learning and how they affect greenhouse gas emissions.

Chris Adams: Awesome. So we actually have some decent deep domain expertise and I'll try to keep this quite. But we might drop into a little bit of like data science nerd around here, but the podcast has done that previously and it turns out to be something that we've got some decent feedback from because there aren't that many podcasts covering.

Okay. So let's, uh, get into this topic of green AI and climate change. As we know, it is a significant driver of emissions in its own, right? When we think about other climate crisis this year, the IPCC, which is the int...

In this episode Asim Hussain is joined by guest Chris Lloyd-Jones; Head of Open Technologies at Avanade and co-chair of the Open Source Working Group at the Green Software Foundation, and Dan Lewis-Toakley; Green Cloud Lead at ThoughtWorks and co-chair of the Open Source Working Group at the Green Software Foundation. They discuss the benefits of open source versus closed source, what tools are already out there and  how open source can help reduce software emissions.

Learn more about our guests:

• Dan Lewis-Toakley: LinkedIn / Twitter / GitHub
• Chris Lloyd-Jones: LinkedIn / Twitter
• Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / Twitter 

Episode resources:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter 
• Green Software Foundation Summit

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

Transcription below:

Chris Lloyd-Jones: If everyone has their data out in the open that they don't feel precious, like they're being compared in a negative way, this incentives to make things better, or you also let all of these open source tools consume from a curated, trusted data source. So open source is almost like that trusted gate for good.

Asim Hussain: So welcome to this podcast episode. My name is Asim Hussain I'm the executive director and chairperson of the Green Software Foundation. And I'm also the green cloud advocacy lead at Microsoft.

Chris Lloyd-Jones: Hello. I am Chris Lloyd-Jones. I am one of the co-chairs of the open source working group, that Green Software Foundation. And I'm also head of open technologies at Avanade.

Dan Lewis-Toakley: Hi folks. I'm Dan Lewis-Toakley. I'm based in Brooklyn, New York. And I'm also a co-chair of the open-source working group at the Green Software Foundation. And I'm the green cloud lead at ThoughtWorks in North America.

Asim Hussain: it's actually just so amazing to have so many people. Uh, Mike focused on grid software and you know, in these environments. So Chris CLJ Chris Lloyd-Jones. So you are at a conference today and you're talking to people about open source software and green open source software.

Chris Lloyd-Jones: Yeah, that's correct. I am at bill today or specifically I'm at the UK chapter in Reading and London. And it's a pretty timely topic based one because I co presented this morning on green software. And there's a really big discussion started with the Green Software Foundation. Then we quickly moved on to CNCF the DPIA and tons of other open source communities.

What was cool is everyone's first thought was how can we work with each other? And also all I see is green software.

Asim Hussain: Yeah. So out of interest, what are people, what is the general impression of people as to what is green software? Cause this is a question which is just, I think, going to constantly be redefined year and year.

Chris Lloyd-Jones: It's interesting actually, because I've seen three broad definitions. The first one was sustainability with technology. So anything from sustainability, like sustainability cloud things like how you track people around your building to make them more efficient. So using technology to make things greener, then there was software.

From my quantity, intrinsically green. So making code greener and less emissions. And I think that the final piece is kind of some combination of the two. So things like using green software for carbon accounting, which was interesting. So I don't really consider that cause I tend to assume that a lot of the accounting protocols that blockchain are inherently not green, which I might be a bit out of date on now, but yeah, three definitions there.

Asim Hussain: When both of you talk about kind of green because you both lead the open-source working group in the foundation. What do you think of when you say, if someone says, what is green open source software, whereas open-source green.

Dan Lewis-Toakley: I can, I can have a stab, uh, same, I suppose, maybe two starting points. One is open source information. I suppose it doesn't necessarily need to be code, right. It could be data or research, but open and readily available tools. Frameworks of research that help enable. Practitioners in the technology space to build software that is green on what we mean by that is software that consumes less energy, particularly dirty energy, and that emits less carbon.

And so we've got quite a wide gambit within the Arkansas working group to sort of explore and discover and help drive and accelerate projects, open source projects that help really enable that space. I think. Been predominantly our focus over the last year, but I think another component is trying to find and understand and accelerate the software itself that is doing things in a green a way.

And so maybe leveraging some of those tools or frameworks that we've discovered, but to help create examples of, you know, software that's written in a Greenaway as sort of a ways for others to learn through that process. So some of the ways that I'd like to think.

Chris Lloyd-Jones: Yeah, I guess I probably agree with that. So I liked the way you started. Cause I think about three opens, open data, open software and open hardware. So kind of sharing. Sharing those different approaches to kind of collaboration and making a lot of important information available outside of large corporates for the common.

Good. And then for me, green software, I do think about carbon and reducing electricity, but I also like to think about the planetary boundaries theory, which are pretty, always banging on. But was thinking about in future, how might we think about e-waste pollution and even vague things like land usage, reducing chemicals, which are much harder to, to affect in any way as software engineers, but I still think we could have something.

Asim Hussain: I think, I think that's one of the space that's kind of what the challenges that we've had is. You're trying to get really focused in on this space. I think required a lot of, you know, narrowing down, not on down the targets. And a lot of us really talk about carbon emissions and things like that. But, you know, you're talking a Palm tree bound.

There are other things, there are other problems. Believe it or not. Ther...

In this episode Asim Hussain is joined by guest Anne Currie; Tech Ethicist at Container Solutions and Lecturer in Tech Ethics at the University of Hertfordshire. What are the real factors that drive organisations choices around increasing efficiency within their organisation?  What needs to happen for senior leaders to make sacrifices for sustainability? Can regulation push for real change inside organisations? They discuss the role of middle managers, developers and their love for ops people!

Learn more about our guests:

• Anne Currie: LinkedIn / Website (Sci-fi Novels included!)
• Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / Twitter 

Episode resources:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter 
• Green Software Foundation Summit

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

Transcript below:
Environment Variables_Ep3_Transcript

Anne Currie: We need to be shifting it so that people think how efficient is this and demanding it? I think our power is developers is not to do stuff. It's to demand stuff of the people. We are buying things.

Asim Hussain: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.

I'm your host. Assamese sane. So welcome to Environment Variables. My name is Asim Hussain. I am the executive director and chairperson of the Green software foundation.

Anne Currie: And I am Anne Currie. I'm a tech ethicist. That's a long time veteran technologist, I'm Tech Ethicist for Container Solutions, which is a member of the Green Software Foundation. I'm a lecturer of Tech Ethics at the University of Hertfordshire. And I am a serial startup founder.

Asim Hussain: So I'm a serial startup, a failure, which is, I think I will. This is, I think maybe this is an interesting direction to go into the, into the topic because the topic I want to talk about today, it was, how do you make change inside and organizational more specifically? How do you. Make changes relates to green software, the greening of our field in how'd you have those conversations inside organizations.

And actually one of the things I have because I've had some success, not a lot, not a lot, not a lot of success, but some success inside the organization, main organization I've worked in while I've kind of gone to space, which is Microsoft. And I often wonder whether the success I've had is linked to all of my startup failures or the failures I've had. And what is a startup, other than trying to convince somebody of something, you know, on the, on the most literally buying into your idea is, is what a startup is. Is that, how is that? How you see it? Do you see similarities?

Anne Currie: Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. And it's not just slightly buying in really buying in.

Asim Hussain: Yeah.

Anne Currie: Yeah.

Asim Hussain: I always say like, you, you need to, like, you really need to come out with going off on a tangent, but I always say to be successful in a startup, you need to give a, a poop about $5. And that is because you need to, you need to get somebody to give you $5 and the, you need to care so much about the first, relatively small amount you're going to get.

You to put so much energy into it that you need to, which is why, if, if, if you're reasonably successful already, it can be quite difficult to get started because you're like, I don't really care about the first $5. Um, I want the billion, but yeah, cause I, I remember maybe describe like, what what'd you describe, you had some, some successes inside your organizations you worked in, in, in, or even, not even in the organization, but generally regarding spreading the word of Greenville.

Anne Currie: Well, actually for me, green software is a relatively recent thing. I've been, I've been pushing it for in my career. I've been pushing efficient software for a long time. And I got, I started down this route. Based on pushing software efficiency. And I found that it really doesn't sell at all. It's I really thought, well, if I can sell people on cutting costs that who doesn't want cutting costs is always on people's lists of things they want to do.

But what I realized was unless it's the number one thing on my list. Like, there'll be, they'll take the meetings with you. They'll talk to you. But fundamentally what they'll actually want you to try to do is solve the problem, which is at the top of their list, which for development organizations is always developer products.

Asim Hussain: Yes.

Anne Currie: That's and the machine productivity will all add cost is always secondary to solving their developer productivity. So you go in trying to sell them on efficiency. And what they actually want you to do is to increase the fee is increasing the developer productivity of their teams. And I had to change the message.

And, and I'll talk to you a little bit. I have to talk about how I changed the green message to align it with. So I had, I had a bit of an epiphany. I was cause I used all of talking about developer efficiency, efficiency of our containers, Docker containers and that kind of stuff. And I was giving a talk at a conference HashCorp EU, about that.

And the person who was immediately before me was Mitchell Hashimoto, who was the, uh, who's the founder of, of HashCorp. I've watched a couple done, fantastic work around, no match, no match scheduler about increasing the efficiency of hosting applications. And my talk was all about increasing efficiency. His talk was all about.

No one could sell increasing efficiency because all anybody cared about was developer efficiency and they didn't care how much it costs to make the lives for their developers simpler. So they were, they were having, they were basing everything off that. And I thought, yeah, I really need to change my message here because he was quite right.

That it is, it is all that anybody cares.

Asim Hussain: Is it, I think, and I just inserted it's up to you, but I think it's because we cost too much. I talk about this. We're very, if you to look at the costs of the cloud workload infrastructure, and...

In this episode Asim Hussain is joined by guests Scott Chamberlin formerly of Microsoft and Henry Richardson of Watttime as they discuss how time-shifting, location-shifting, curtailment and other terms are important to Carbon Aware Computing. How can we build sustainable software that reduces the impact on the environment and how these decisions may just lie in the hands of the developers instead of the CSR teams.  

Learn more about our guests:

• Scott Chamberlin: LinkedIn
• Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / Twitter 
• Henry Richardson: LinkedIn / Website 

Episode resources:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter 
• Green Software Foundation Summit
• Magazine: Branch Magazine

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Asim Hussain: And one way I think about carbon awareness is actually I'm building software, which responds to natural cycles of the earth. And it connects me with nature in an indirect way, but it's one of the few ways you can connect with nature. I think in software. 

Hello and welcome to environment variables brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software. I'm your host, Asim Hussain, welcome to the Environment Variables Podcast.

We have an exciting episode today talking about carbon aware computing.

Scott Chamberlin: Hi, I'm Scott Chamberlain. I was previously at Microsoft leading some of the sustainability efforts in the windows organization. And the day, this podcast is airing. I'm actually starting a new role at Intel leading their software sustainability effort.

Henry Richardson: And I'm Henry Richardson. With Wattime we're a nonprofit really focused on making grid emissions, available to partners to achieve impact through load flexibility of sighting of renewables. And so we're really excited about the kind of expansion of capabilities in software to take advantage of flexibility in grid emissions.

Asim Hussain: Henry cause this, this, this is your, this is your bread and butter. This is your space. Do you think you can give a, go trying to explain, you know, carbon intensity in these concepts to the audience here.

Henry Richardson: Absolutely. One of the things that we spend a lot of time thinking about is how. Clean or dirty that the electric grid is. And what we mean by that is when you make a change on the electric grid by increasing or decreasing load, how does emissions change? So if you decide to schedule a compute load at a specific hour, a certain set of power plants will be responding to that change in load and they'll have an associated emissions.

And so you can see how by scheduling. Load updates or sorry, windows updates to specific times you could actually affect which power plants are operating. Ideally, we would be scheduling those two when there's excess solar, excess wind, which can happen pretty often in the great Plains. There's a lot of excess wind, a lot of excess solar in California, but you can also pick between coal and natural gas, if you can have that flexibility.

So. We measure the intensity, the electric grid, and then we make that information available the software and making it available to software as what we consider carbon awareness. So can the software take advantage of that? The time varying emissions, intensity of the electric grid and actually change when it trains machine learning loads, as Scott was saying updates, major pieces of software, can you run.

At different times because they're, they're run chronically or regular. So things like that. So we see lots of opportunities in software to be kind of carbon aware and take advantage of this, this flexible.

Asim Hussain: Yeah, I think there's lots of other examples. I mean, there's, there's other big, big examples of well as well from other organizations, but where they started to apply the ideas relate to, to a carbon Alanise I think broadly, it, it, if you have the kind of. Software workload, which can respond to a signal, not all software can, that's the chatter challenge.

Not all software can respond like this, but if you do have the kind of workload that can respond like this, and that's why the windows update is such a perfect type of workload, because it's something that, you know, you need to do at some point. But you can have a reasonable amount of flexibility over when, when that happens.

If you're, if you're, if I'm visiting a webpage, I don't have that. You know, I need that web. And in three seconds, the other kind of famous use case I've seen is a large, large scale implementation of this I've seen is, is the work that Google's done with their carbon way data centers, which I think is quite an interesting, like the work that Microsoft's done with the windows is, is, is, is on a device.

And then Scott you've told me before I keep on saying, I'm sure I get the number wrong. Is it 10 billion devices around the world? Use windows? Is it? What is it?

Scott Chamberlin: think the last public number is either 1.4, 1.5 billion devices use windmill point for 1.5 billion client devices use windows, and then there's a separate, separate staff for our servers and data. 

Asim Hussain: Well, so there's a, quite a few people in the world who now think is 10 billion, because I just threw that stat out so many times in the past, one of the things you're involved with at your time at Microsoft Scott was well windows, but specifically, and then an announcement that windows made recently.

Do you want to give a quick summary as to what that was.

Scott Chamberlin: sure. Totally. And again, this is in partnership. Wattime and Henry's organization as us in partnership with electricity map and the tomorrow organization. One of the first things that we did in windows was figure out how do we bring carbon awareness into the. Operating system, right? The operating system is responsible for scheduling tasks.

One of the things that does, and the question we had was if we had a CO2 intensity signal, could we number one? Change the behavior of th...

In this episode Asim is joined by guests Chris Adams, Sara Bergman and Danielle Erickson and they discuss the impact that Amazon’s Customer Carbon Footprint Tool is having on the green software landscape. How do services like AWS affect climate change and what are the effects on the environment of these huge data centres? We also learn about how you can use heat from greenhouses to grow tomatoes!

Learn more about our guests:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website 
• Sara Bergman: LinkedIn / Twitter 
• Danielle Erickson: LinkedIn

Episode resources:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter 

• Person: Adrian Cockcroft 
• Blog: David Mytton
• Blog: SRE Methods & Climate Change - Benoit Petit 
• Presentation: Green Cloud Triangle 
• Magazine: Branch Magazine

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

Transcript below:
[background music]

Danielle Erickson: We're looking at the AWS tool, the Google tool, and the Microsoft tool and understanding the broader strategy, so when you combine those two things, I think that's what we have to do right now to strategize in the best way to reduce our emissions.

Asim Hussain: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding Green Software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software. I'm your host, Asim Hussain. Welcome to Environment Variables, our new podcast. My name is Asim Hussain. I'm the executive director of the Green Software Foundation.

Chris Adams: Hi, there. My name is Chris Adams. I am one of the directors of the Green Web Foundation.

Asim: The Green Web Foundation, the Green Software Foundation, there's a story behind that.

Chris: There is indeed.

Danielle: Hi. I'm Danielle Erickson. I am the product manager of the Cleantech service line at Thoughtworks and the product manager of an open-source tool we created called Cloud Carbon Footprint.

Sara Bergman: Hi. My name is Sara Bergman. I am a software engineer at Microsoft and I'm also the chair of the writer's project in the Green Software Foundation.

Asim: All right. I think we're here today to at least start off talking about Amazon's Customer Carbon footprint tool that they announced recently. This is something I saw they announced in re:Invent which if I remember right, was it November or December in last year, in 2021? They announced it in November or December and it's a method of measuring the carbon emissions of customers' workloads on Amazon.

I don't know how all you all feel about it but I was really impressed with just the speed with which they made their second announcement, which was just, when was it? Weeks ago now or maybe February, they then announced it in preview. It was incredible breakneck speed. I was expecting from their re:Invent to wait a year for them to publish something. For me, that was a really, I felt like I had a whiplash. I was like, "Whoa." Has anybody else had a chance to look at their announcement?

Chris: I have. I think it's really cool. I'm really, really glad that something like this exists because if you consider yourself a responsible technologist, I figure the electricity has to come from somewhere, and being able to have this information allows you to optimize for carbon and given the information that is shared with us increasingly in the news, it's worthwhile actually referring to this. For example, the WPC, so the IPCC report explicitly mentions digital and the role we have to play now in that. Having the tools to instrument that is really, really handy. We actually used to work on something like this. A couple of years ago, we built a tool called Amazon Green Cost Explorer, which basically used some of the billing API to work out which regions were green and which ones were not green, so you can act on this. To actually have something much more fine and green is really, really cool, but it's not the only project going in this field, I suppose. It might be worth talking about that, yes, there are other ways that you can understand the environmental impact if you compute than just using this, for example, even though it's very, very useful and very, very welcome.

Sara: Yes. I think that's a really good point. I think, for example, if you think about performance, some people are very interested in getting into the nitty-gritty. I want to read the logs, I want to really get down to it but others are just I want to see my latency. I think the same goes for carbon, right? For some, this will be revolutionary and this will be a great way to get any kind of insight but there are others who are ahead of the pack where maybe the granularity isn't enough or isn't timely enough or whatever but this isn't a really good first step in my opinion.

Danielle: This is something that customers have been asking for for a while, so to see Amazon respond in this way and give some visibility that I believe is generally available, this tool. Anyone who uses AWS can see their carbon emissions over time is really incredible. It's a great step in the right direction and as Chris already said, there is a lot more regulatory pressure to be reporting on this. Everyone's going to need this and I think if Amazon can make this first step, we can hope that in the future, they'll continue to respond to this demand and this need the customers are having, so really excited about this.

Asim: This is my mistake as well. It's generally available, is it now, Danielle? I just assumed it was a preview.

Danielle: That was my understanding, but Sara, you may know better?

Sara: No, I heard the same. It sounded like it was for everyone who uses their services.