Findings from our project partners

We recently hosted two webinars to share the outcomes of work undertaken by our project partners. Both webinars were an opportunity for the wider research community to engage with and discuss the project outcomes. If you were unable to attend, you can view the recording and slides below.

Anyone interested in learning more about, or is interested in contributing to, the development of a UKRI roadmap for net zero digital research infrastructure would benefit from watching these recordings.

Webinar 1 - Technical and Operational Challenges

Webinar 2 - Community and Organisational Challenges

Webinar 1 covered technical and operational challenges such as: hardware procurement, design and architecture of infrastructure, cloud platforms, consolidation, power management and efficiency, end-of-life, and carbon capture and offsetting. Project partners that presented were:

  • CarbonQuanDRI: developing a measurement trace capturing various sustainability aspects in the operation of a DRI service, including dependencies between different indicators (e.g. data flow, power consumption, and carbon intensity)
  • IRISCAST: auditing energy usage of the IRIS DRI via snap-hot data capture
  • Energetic: exploring energy-to-solution consumption in High Performance Computing (HPC)
  • HPC-Jeep: informing efficient, environmentally conscientious use of HPC resources – ARCHER2 and DiRAC
  • Mapping the DRI: collating a representative sample of the DRI using the UKRI InfraPortal
  • Case studies update – detailed analysis for the following infrastructures: JASMIN, Archer2, Jade, Scafell Pike

Webinar 2 covered community and organisational challenges such as: user facing services, data management, behaviour change, training, proportionality of energy use, the risks of negative impacts, and monitoring and driving change. Project partners that presented were:

  • Arinzrit: mapping the DRI policy and practice landscape
  • Value: developing recommendations for evaluating carbon emissions vs output ‘value’ to support UKRI decision-making
  • Go Zero: empowering the research community to take ownership of Net Zero
  • DRI User Behaviour Survey: identifying implicit attitudes to environmental sustainability and gathered information about existing sustainable usage of DRI
  • Art to inspire collective action on sustainable digital research infrastructure: the progress so far and how you can get involved

Thank you again to our wonderful project partners - it’s a huge project milestone to see your results. We are busy condensing the findings and recommendations into our next interim report - further details about this soon.