The Carbon-Centric Computing Coalition: An Industry-Academia Partnership

An industry-academia consortium is in the process of being formed as the next step in the carbon-centric computing initiative (CCCI) agenda. The consortium agenda includes the following:

(1) A focused program of research to integrate a range of “carbon-centric” computing technologies and bring these to market-ready state. For instance, a range of optimization software/solution vendors provide stand-alone solutions — additional R&D can enable collaborative optimization in a vendor-agnostic fashion. Similarly, a range of vendors and integrators engage in various aspects of business process automation — additional R&D can provide a principled basis for incorporating techniques for business process optimization (relative to “carbon” objectives) into their offerings.

(2) Proactive advocacy with government at various levels to ensure explicit support (potentially through new schemes) for the deployment of efficiency enhancing IT tools.

(3) Proactive efforts to educate industry (and other potential user communities) on the available repertoire of efficiency-enhancing information technologies.

(4) A program of research and standardization to enable a uniform basis for carbon accounting in the IT sector. This would require conjoint assessment of the energy footprint of computing infrastructure and the energy savings accruing from the smart use of carbon-centric computing technologies.

(5) A program of standardization to ensure inter-operability of technology developed in this sector.

This climate change dimension to the application of IT remains under-emphasized, and under-utilized — the coalition will seek to redress this.

An initial list of corporate supporters is being put together and includes:

(1) Actenum Corporation