Software systems are embedded in all aspects of societal life from health, commerce, communication, and education, to energy, entertainment, finance, governance, and defence.
Technology is now considered as underpinning virtually all the proposed solutions which are designed to support sustainability. However, it is estimated that by 2040 the information and communications technology (ICT) sector is expected to account for 14% of the world’s carbon footprint. It is also estimated that the training of GPT-3, a single general-purpose Artificial Intelligence (AI) program, took 1.287 gigawatt hours of electricity. This represents the annual electricity consumption of 120 domestic dwellings.
In addition, data centres that host AI computing infrastructure consume a significant amount of energy and produce carbon emissions, which has yet to be determined or disclosed. Sustainable computing is a rapidly expanding research area which is concerned with the production and consumption of computing resources.
Sustainable computing systems are those which are explicitly designed for continuous maintainability and evolvability without incurring prohibitive technical debt and making a negative impact on the environment, economy and society. Examples of several major research challenges in the field of sustainable computing include Energy-efficient Computing, Green Computing, Cloud Computing, Data Management, and Social and Economic Implications. As such, sustainable computing considers the total cost, impact and benefit of technology systems.
