Job-level Carbon and Water Footprint Estimation for HPC: Bias Assessment from Runtime to Full Life Cycle

2026-07-21

AI Summary

This study addresses the limited scope of traditional high-performance computing (HPC) evaluations, which typically focus solely on performance and energy consumption while overlooking the comprehensive environmental costs of operational configurations. The authors propose the first job-level unified accounting framework that integrates both operational and full life-cycle (embodied) carbon and water footprints. Leveraging life-cycle assessment methodologies, real-time runtime monitoring, and hardware manufacturing emission data, the framework enables fine-grained quantification of environmental impacts. The analysis reveals that increasing thread count generally reduces total environmental footprints, albeit with diminishing marginal returns; while carbon footprints are predominantly driven by operational phases, water footprints are largely dominated by embodied impacts. By jointly incorporating both footprint types at the job granularity, this work establishes a novel paradigm for assessing HPC sustainability.

Abstract

High performance computing evaluation has traditionally focused on performance and energy, but these metrics alone cannot capture the sustainability cost of runtime configurations. We proposes a unified job-level water and carbon accounting framework with both operational and embodied impacts. Results show that higher thread counts generally reduce total footprint, but the benefit diminishes at higher thread counts. Water is mainly dominated by embodied impact, whereas carbon is mainly dominated by operational impact.

Problem

• carbon footprint
• water footprint
• high performance computing
• life cycle assessment
• sustainability

Innovation

• job-level footprint
• carbon accounting
• water footprint
• embodied impact
• HPC sustainability