95kg of CO2?
To simulate a virus for 0,1 second!
What is the environmental impact of Bioinformatics?
A good rule of thumb is that about 20-40% of energy is needed for the severs in data centers. 40% of their energy is used for cooling and about 20% of their downtime due to overheating.
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What causes the footprint?
On the one hand it is the electricity to run our code and our servers. This is also where the numbers from above stand for: doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msac034
However, the other aspect is what you can feel with your hands, the hardware: the hard-drives, processors, keyboards and screens …
It depends on the product which of the two is more significant. For small devices such as mobile phones, the hardware aspect can be worse, especially due to the shipping of the components around the world
What can I do?
Measure your own footprint
To become aware of your own footprint and to have a starting point, quantifying your impact is helpful.
Head over to green-algorithms and find an easy to use software to get started!
You just need to put in information such as the runtime, number of cores, where you run your jobs and a few others.
Concrete Examples
Tips & Tricks
Tools And Initiatives
Additional Considerations
Want More?
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