Energy expenditure of computational research in context
There have been a few papers recently on “green computing”, and changes we can make to ensure our work is more sustainable. The most important aspect to this is the overuse of energy in conducting our analysis, especially if the energy is derived from burning fossil fuels. What I want to do here is to put in context the energy expenditure of research computing systems by comparing it to other energy expenditures such as travel and transport. Energy consumption of a workstation or small server In order to quantify the energy expenditure of a compute system, we need to make some assumptions. We will assume that for bioinformatics, the CPU is the main consumer of power, is working at 50% of capacity. AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (16 cores / 32 threads) Maximum power consumption = 142 W /2 = 71 W source High end motherboard: 75 W. RAM stick: 3 W * 8 = 24 W Mid range graphics card idle = 12 W HDD Storage: 9 W * 2 = 18 W Total: 71 + 75 + 24 + 12 + 18 = 200 W So a workstation, or small server with 32 th