Sustainable Federated Compute Infrastructures

The SUSFECIT (Sustainable Federated Compute Infrastructures) project is a joint project coordinated by the Physics Institute at the University of Freiburg involving operators of high-performance data centres who share their computing capacities. The project develops methods and tools to reduce the resource and greenhouse gas footprint of this data centre network. Depending on dynamic conditions such as utilisation, the expected share of renewable energies in the power grid and the scope of the respective computing task, the computing loads are shifted (‘orchestrated’) within the network. The Öko-Institut's contribution consists of assessing the environmental impacts of the hardware infrastructure, both in terms of manufacturing costs and the usage phase, and deriving optimisation strategies from this.