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Carbon-Efficient Design Optimization for Computing Systems

Published: 02 August 2023 Publication History

Abstract

The world's push toward an environmentally sustainable society is highly dependent on the semiconductor industry, due to carbon footprints of global-scale sources such as computing systems for virtual and extended reality applications (VR and XR). Despite previous carbon modeling efforts for such computing systems, there lacks a wide range of design tools to optimize total life cycle carbon footprint (during manufacturing and also during day-to-day operation), while meeting application-level constraints (power, performance, area). To address this need, we have developed a carbon-aware design framework that optimizes carbon efficiency of computing systems---quantified by metrics such as total Carbon Delay Product (tCDP: the product of total carbon and total application execution time)---while also identifying key design parameters for improving carbon efficiency. As a case study, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework to improve tCDP of hardware accelerators for artificial intelligence (AI) and XR applications. We show: (1) optimizing for carbon efficiency (tCDP) instead of energy efficiency (Energy-Delay Product or EDP) improves carbon efficiency by up to 6.9×---i.e., optimizing for EDP is insufficient; (2) for multi-core CPUs inside production VR headsets, optimizing number of cores (from 8 to 4) improves tCDP by 1.25× (over their entire lifetime); (3) leveraging an advanced three-dimensional integration (3D) technique (3D stacking of separately-fabricated logic and memory chips) can improve tCDP by 6.9× vs. conventional systems (no 3D stacking).

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  • (2024)Energy-/Carbon-Aware Evaluation and Optimization of 3-D IC Architecture With Digital Compute-in-Memory DesignsIEEE Journal on Exploratory Solid-State Computational Devices and Circuits10.1109/JXCDC.2024.347910010(98-106)Online publication date: 2024
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cover image ACM Conferences
HotCarbon '23: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Sustainable Computer Systems
July 2023
145 pages
ISBN:9798400702426
DOI:10.1145/3604930
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 02 August 2023

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  1. sustainable computing systems
  2. carbon-efficient optimization

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  • (2024)Beyond Efficiency: Scaling AI SustainablyIEEE Micro10.1109/MM.2024.340927544:5(37-46)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Energy-/Carbon-Aware Evaluation and Optimization of 3-D IC Architecture With Digital Compute-in-Memory DesignsIEEE Journal on Exploratory Solid-State Computational Devices and Circuits10.1109/JXCDC.2024.347910010(98-106)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)Dirty Electrons: On the Carbon Intensity of Stored Energy2024 IEEE 15th International Green and Sustainable Computing Conference (IGSC)10.1109/IGSC64514.2024.00018(45-51)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2024

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