IRISCAST

IRISCAST = IRIS Carbon Audit SnapshoT

What’s the scope of this work?

Making good decisions around infrastructure procurement and provision requires understanding, as much as possible, the full carbon costs for operating, maintaining, and using the infrastructure; going beyond accounting for electricity and cooling, and including the full chain of costs embodied in the infrastructure. Enabling good decision making therefore requires a source of accurate real-world data on infrastructure climate impacts.

IRISCAST set out to identify where the carbon cost sits across a large multi-site infrastructure including the embodied carbon costs of both infrastructure (such as computers and data storage devices) and housing (such as data centre buildings and equipment).

A carbon audit was conducted during a 24-hour snapshot period of various Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) assets. Gathering inventories, energy usage and other data across 6 heterogeneous facilities, IRISCAST has been able to model the carbon costs of the facilities that were snapshot and also develop a carbon model and methods to gather the data.

In order to engage the community, two workshops were undertaken to conduct the audit and then to interpret and communicate the findings.

The full report can be found here: DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7692451

Representatives:
Jonathan Hays, Queen Mary University of London
Nicholas Walton, University of Cambridge
Adrian Jackson, University of Edinburgh

Proposal: DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6787626

Final Report: DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7692451