Following France’s commitment to significantly reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across all sectors after signing the Paris Agreement, including in research, we conducted a carbon footprint assessment of our computing infrastructure. A first evaluation was performed in 2019. In light of the renewal of our computing cluster in 2023, we carried out a new GHG emission estimation in 2024. This initiative aims to raise awareness among both users and decision-makers and to guide future sustainability efforts.
Our analysis estimated the carbon footprint at 3.6 g CO₂e per core.hour for 2024, including hardware manufacture, transport, End of Life stage and electricity consumption but also agents impact, see Table 1 and Figure 1 for details.
The following assumptions were used for the estimation:
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A device lifespan of 7 years,
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A Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.5 for the data center,
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The French electricity mix, with an emission factor of 0.06 kg CO₂e / kWh,
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A total computing time of approximately 16,000,000 core.hours in 2019.
The hardware included in the scope consists of front-end servers, compute nodes, network equipment, and work storage (long-term storage is excluded from the compute-related emissions). GHG emissions from hardware account for the entire lifecycle, from raw material extraction to transport and deployment. Many manufacturers publish data on their devices’ carbon impacts, which we used to inform our calculations.
|
Source |
Emissions (kg CO₂e) |
Emissions per core.hour (g CO₂e) |
|---|---|---|
|
Device Manufacturing / Transport / EoL |
31,059 |
1.98 |
|
Electricity Consumption |
22,816 |
1.45 |
|
Agents (indirect emissions) |
2,700 |
0.17 |
|
Total |
56,575 |
3.60 |
Table 1. Genotoul Bioinfo – Carbon Footprint in 2024
On average, emissions from device manufacturing, transport, and EoL account for 31,060 kg CO₂e per year, equivalent to 1.98 g CO₂e per core.hour.
In 2024, the Genotoul Bioinfo facility consumed a total of 380,300 kWh of electricity. This corresponded to a carbon footprint of 1.45 grams of CO₂e per core-hour of computation, attributable to device manufacturing.
Figure 1. Repartition of CHG
We also assessed the carbon footprint related to device manufacturing for long-term storage (excluding `work`), which resulted in an estimated impact of 11 grams of CO₂e per gigabyte per year.