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To what extent are the resulting co2 emissions of a program linked to its runtime resource use? On a succesful SV "web scale" app they are no doubt notable, but

To what extent are the resulting co2 emissions of a program linked to its runtime resource use? On a succesful SV "web scale" app they are no doubt notable, but for 99.999% of programs the costs of getting it written surely dominate. The CO2 footprint then comes from the resulting consumer spending and other downstream economic activity, quantifiable by carbon intensity of the economy ($/kg/CO2e). [1] As a thought exercise, think what happens when a company engages a consultancy to make a Postgres backed Java or Python app running in AWS to replace a business process run previously in a overgrown Excel sheet and brain of a soon to be retired domain expert. Programmers are hired, (second) cars are bought, overseas vacations are had, what happens to co2 emissions? The choice between Java or Rust makes zero difference. The choice between Java and Excel might, but not because of runtime performance... TLDR; almost always it's the development budget, not CPU use. [1] You can see this number by country at https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-intensity https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-intensity - about 0.1 - 0.6 kg/$ in industrualized places

jjice 5y ago
The original post felt like when companies like Coca-cola tell you to recycle and act like the burden is with the individual instead of the massive corporation. Since this data was either posted (or at least referenced, can't remember) by AWS, it seems fitting. Amazon couldn't possibly have the power to deal with these rising emissions, it's the code that our customers run being written in Python that does it! I'd like to see tech industry emissions as a whole, just for running software. I have to imagine it's pretty minuscule in the grand scheme, but still interesting. What does a product like Instagram that has a huge user base and an application written (mostly?) in Python create in emissions and energy use? I guess we'd also have to consider that the societal benefit of Instagram isn't as high as trucks that deliver food to grocery stores, so truck emissions may be seen as more necessary emissions. It's a really deep rabbit hole. I find the concepts interested, though don't put too much thought into these issues I don't directly control.
- wmf 5y ago
  AWS has huge incentives to optimize their infrastructure as much as possible. One that's done, all AWS resource consumption is on behalf of their customers.

jjice 5y ago

The original post felt like when companies like Coca-cola tell you to recycle and act like the burden is with the individual instead of the massive corporation. Since this data was either posted (or at least referenced, can't remember) by AWS, it seems fitting. Amazon couldn't possibly have the power to deal with these rising emissions, it's the code that our customers run being written in Python that does it! I'd like to see tech industry emissions as a whole, just for running software. I have to imagine it's pretty minuscule in the grand scheme, but still interesting. What does a product like Instagram that has a huge user base and an application written (mostly?) in Python create in emissions and energy use? I guess we'd also have to consider that the societal benefit of Instagram isn't as high as trucks that deliver food to grocery stores, so truck emissions may be seen as more necessary emissions. It's a really deep rabbit hole. I find the concepts interested, though don't put too much thought into these issues I don't directly control.

wmf 5y ago
AWS has huge incentives to optimize their infrastructure as much as possible. One that's done, all AWS resource consumption is on behalf of their customers.