About
Scientific progress increasingly depends on powerful computing infrastructure, yet its environmental impacts across the full life cycle are often overlooked. This study evaluates the energy and resource efficiency of computing hardware and software within the Faculty of Science and Engineering (FSE) at the University of Manchester, informing the university's sustainability targets, including Net Zero by 2050. Using life cycle assessment (LCA), hardware audits, and software energy profiling, the study compares three computing setups: desktop computers, laptops, and high-throughput computing cluster nodes. System boundaries cover component production and operational use across 15-year scenarios.
Specialised compute nodes dominate most impact categories, particularly those driven by manufacturing. Across nearly all indicators, embodied impacts exceed operational electricity use, highlighting the growing significance of manufacturing burdens despite grid decarbonisation. Scenario analyses demonstrate that replacement strategies strongly influence outcomes, underlining the importance of demand management and procurement policies in reducing academic computing's environmental footprint.
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The talk
Credits and licence
- Institution
- CERN
- Taught by
- Caterina Doglioni, Tobias Fitschen
- Year
- 2026
- Language
- English
- Subjects
- Mathematics
- Source
- CERN
- Licence
- CERN, as CERN states it. CERN's terms
- Attribution
- © CERN. CERN provides its audiovisual media free of charge for educational and informational use, credited to CERN; this lecture is shown in CERN's own player.
- Who can watch
- CERN gives no rating. Invisible Network shows it to Tweens profiles and older, judged from what the source says about it. How courses are placed