This week I went to EcoCompute 2025, Berlin. An amazing event all about sustainable ICT in very broad sense: from coding, to hardware and from AI to datacenter cooling. My hosting label Halvar is sustainable from a-z and therefore it is important to share knowledge and stay up to date of things happening in the field.
If course I took the relaxing train, the ICE from the Netherlands to Berlin.
My key takeaways:
- Ecocompute attendees love lenovo laptops 🙂
- If, as a conference organisation, you really want to, your conference itself can be very sustainable. Some examples: re-use lanyards, only offer vegetarian/vegan food, skip goodie bags.
- You _can_ measure compute power in watts for applications and operations, but be aware that your numbers might be under-representing by a percentage as big as 60 percent
- Looking blindly at PuE for datacenters is absolute noncence. Just one example: What if a DC with 1.2 is looking coal as energy source and another DC with 1.5 is only using renewables?
- Shifting workloads away from default providers will have a significant reduce of co2 and your finances to run them.
- There is no sustainable AI. Only the AI you don't use at all is sustainable.
- Sidenote: GreenAI is doing a good job in reducing the impact per query/prompt by helping users to optimize prompts and hosting in France.
- Domain specific smaller LM's beat large LM (LLMs) in performance and are less unsustainble.
- If you make a statement about your companies green achievements and usage. BACK IT UP with evidence. Yes we (Halvar) have won first prize for most sustainable sponsor at DrupalCon 2024 Barcelona. Which of course we also visited by train.
- Awesome attendees at Ecocompute, aging from across the board in all genders (m/f/x) with open attitudes 🙂
So, see you all next year!
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