IRIS-Carbon-Audit-SnapshoT

This project will perform an audit of carbon costs across a multi-site heterogenous infrastructure by collecting and analysing snapshots of actual usage across different facilities within the IRIS community. This will be combined with analysis of the embodied costs and careful mapping and consideration of the underlying assumptions to produce an estimate of the overall carbon cost, the key elements that contribute to it, and the important metrics needed to measure it.

The results of this audit will be shared with the IRIS community at a workshop (and publicly released) to help interpret, review, and communicate our findings. In the course of the analysis, we will be combining multiple different datasets into a coherent derived dataset to produce our findings, which will be made publicly available by IRIS.

The key objectives are:
- identifying where the carbon cost sits across a large multi-site infrastructure including the embodied carbon costs of both infrastructure (such as computers and data storage devices) and housing (such as data centre buildings and equipment)

- understanding of what are the drivers that influence carbon cost that should feed into modelling and decision making and what are the relevant, useful, and practical metrics that can be used to establish this

- engagement across communities to conduct the audit and interpret and communicate the findings

- capture the insights to feed into future larger scale projects towards carbon cost modelling, reporting, and influencing.
- With an understanding of where the carbon cost lies in our UKRI DRI, contribute to the development of tools to allow an easier assessment of carbon costs in line with industry such as the Amazon AWS Carbon Footprint Tools