Societal Impacts of Scheduling in HPC and Datacenters

Our objective within this chapter is to clarify the environmental impacts of HPC platforms and Data Centers. On the first side, these domains contribute significantly to carbon emissions. The total weight of both domains is increasing in absolute terms more rapidly than the gains in energy efficiency. Furthermore, the impact is not just on HPC applications or digital cloud services by themselves, but on the entire ecosystem enabled by digital technology today. On the other side, HPC is helping to reduce the overall environmental footprint in other sectors. Thus, we need to consider the trade-off between the benefits of applications and services and their environmental cost. This is a difficult task since digital technologies are most often hidden and then considered as virtual by the majority of people. In addition, this chapter shows how to develop good practices for energy-efficient architectures and softwares. In particular, we present lifecycle analyses, which make it possible to take everything into account in the carbon footprint, including materiality. One of the fundamental points in our study is to look beyond direct effects and to consider rebound effects when designing new services and applications.