This Focus Group will explore ways to assess and minimise the environmental impact of ELIXIR, and of data handling in general. We will raise awareness about the issues and solutions. We will also explore how ELIXIR can help interdisciplinary research on the environmental impact on human health and biodiversity.
1. Environmental impact of scientific computing
We aim to:
- Raise awareness
- Collect and summarise information for our community
- Make service users aware of their environmental impact, e.g. expose the impact of an analysis in Galaxy
- Explore methods for the environmental impact assessment of scientific computing (e.g. hardware architectures, optimised hardware utilisation; energy consumption (in KWh electricity used to complete computations as part of the research work), energy sources, network usage (since transferring data comes at a cost), location)
- Minimise rework by reusing as much as possible existing "building blocks" which have already been developed and validated (instead of systematically "reinventing the wheel")
- Suggest actions to mitigate the impact
2. Environmental impact of ELIXIR
We aim to:
- Offer concrete recommendations on how to lower the environmental impact of ELIXIR as a community, network of people and institutions, and as an organisation
- Link ELIXIR Platforms with the Green IT movement
3. Environmental impact on human health and nature
We aim to:
- Bring together scientific communities e.g.:
- Climate science
- Biodiversity (FAIR-EASE, BGE)
- EuroScienceGateway
- Health data with geolocation (EOSC4Cancer, BY-COVID)
- Toxicology
- Human exposome (EIRENE), chemical exposures (PARC)
- Promote efforts that will help interdisciplinary research on planetary health
This group will initially work through this GitHub repo and a channel on the ELIXIR Slack space
Leadership
(ELIXIR Norway)
(Norway)
Image
(ELIXIR Germany)
Participants
- Anne Fouilloux (Galaxy Climate Science Workbench Lead)
- Matúš Kalaš (Tools Platform Ecosystem, ELIXIR-NO)
- Björn Grüning (Tools Platform Lead, ELIXIR-DE)
- Mira Kuntz (Galaxy Project, ELIXIR-DE)
- Nicola Soranzo (Galaxy Project, ELIXIR-UK)
- Gareth Price (Australia, Galaxy, Galaxy Australia)
- Salvador Capella-Gutiérrez (Tools Platform Lead, ELIXIR-ES)
- Venkata Satagopam (TeCG, HGTD, ELIXIR-LU)
- Helge Hecht (ELIXIR-CZ)
- Maria Luisa Chiusano (ELIXIR-IT)
- Laila Los (ELIXIR-DE)
- Vincent Breton (CNRS/IN2P3, ELIXIR-FR)