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Chris was recently joined by postdoctoral researcher Romain Jacob, for a deep dive into the topic of greening the networks that make up the internet.
What is Environment Variables?
Environment Variables is the podcast published by the industry body, Green Software Foundation – similar in name to us but a different organisation. We’ve been recording the sustainable software engineering podcast in collaboration for the last two years, with Chris Adams, as show co-host. In the episodes Chris talks with those working in the industry to glean insights, with the aim of making it easier for professional technologists to build in digital sustainability practices to their own work.
Episode 78 – a greener internet that grows old and sleeps more
In the most recent episode, we explore Romain Jacob and his team’s work on the award winning Hypnos research paper. The paper was presented at the recent conference HotCarbon 2024 in California, and it looks into options for reducing the environmental impact of the networks powering the internet through the power of sleep.
More specifically, we explore why allowing parts of the internet to sleep when not in use can help reduce the total amount of energy needed – and therefore the amount of energy we would need to decarbonise for a fossil free internet – along with the nuance of how to do this responsibly.
We also explore the trade-offs for reducing the embodied carbon footprint of electronics through extending their life span. Where can extending the life of hardware can help, and where savings might not be high as we might hope?
Finally we dive into the mental models that could inform our own work on CO2.js. CO2.js is the software library the Green Web Foundation maintains to make the work of researchers in academia usable to the widest number of practitioners building digital services possible.
Where to listen to the episode
You can see the dedicated episode page with an in-browser media player, shownotes, and transcript, as well as links to all the common ways to subcribe to the podcast for future episodes.