Environment Variables

This Week in Green Software, Valeria, Adi, and Oli come together to explore the concept of Shift-Left Sustainability—the idea that environmental impact should be considered early in the software development lifecycle rather than after deployment. They discuss how better measurement, developer tooling, and practical incentives can help teams build more efficient and environmentally responsible software, why sustainability should be treated more like security, and highlight growing government interest in digital sustainability.Learn more about our people:Valeria Salis: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteAditya Manglik: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteOliver Winks: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:Shift-Left Sustainability: How to develop green software by design | Kolaxis [03:42]We nearly had power profiling in Chromium | Fershad [18:25]GDSA Summit returns: building on our progress | Sustainable ICT [25:36]Events:Green Software Practitioner Study Day | 13 Mar 10:00 am GMT (Brighton) [31:22]What Software Doesn’t “Count” | 17 Mar 6:00 pm CET (Barcelona) [3:19]Reducing Cost and Carbon | 18 Mar 6:00 pm CET (Hamburg) [33:56]LUT x Sustinaires | 25 Mar 7:15 am CET (Virtual) [34:55]Green Software Italia | 30 Mar 6:30 pm CET (Milan) [35:18]UX Jumpstart 26 Mar 2:00 pm CET (Virtual) [35:42]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Host Kate Goldenring is joined by Chris Adams and Tzviya Siegman for a news round-up on sustainable software. They dig into EnergyNet and the idea of routing electricity more like the internet, unpack the latest AI energy and greenwashing debates, and look at policy and research angles — from proactive water planning for data centers to a cap-and-trade style proposal for AI efficiency.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteKate Goldenring: LinkedIn | WebsiteTzviya Siegman: LinkedIn | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:EnergyNet Task Force [03:50]EnergyNet on GitHub [03:50]EnergyNet expands to 280 apartments in Lund (Warp News) [03:50]Is this EnergyNet thing legit? (Chris Adams) [03:50]Sam Altman / OpenAI energy use and data centers (The Guardian) [12:20]Big Tech says generative AI will save the planet - proof is thin (WIRED) [01:10]Big tech greenwashing report (Ketan Joshi) [13:20]Different kinds of AI in the climate context (Chris Adams) [15:00]AI's Never Just One Thing: Different FLOPS for Different Folks (Hugging Face) [18:20]Great Lakes region unprepared for increasing water use demands(Alliance for the Great Lakes) [30:10]AI Cap-and-Trade: Efficiency Incentives for Accessibility and Sustainability [36:20]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Asim Hussain introduces more new co-hosts on this episode of TWiGS as they explore the evolving intersection of AI, infrastructure, and sustainability. The discussion covers the growing energy demands of AI workloads, the tension between innovation and environmental impact, and the role of standards and policy in guiding responsible growth. From data center expansion to practical steps engineers can take today, the hosts share insights on how the tech industry can balance rapid advancement with measurable climate accountability.Learn more about our people:Asim Hussain: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteAditya Manglik: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteCarlos Pignatoro: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteOli Winks: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteValeria Salis: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:Why AI's water problem might actually be an opportunity | World Economic Forum [06:13]GreenOps - CloudBolt: Greener cloud usage multiplies with Kubernetes optimisation [23:51]Enabled emissions: How AI helps to supercharge oil and gas production [35:05]Events:Sustainable AI: Your 2026 Playbook | 19 Feb 18:00 GMT (Virtual) [45:31]Meme-tivism: Rethinking the Environmental Footprint of AI & ML | King's College London | 23 Feb (London) [45:54]Code Green London | 24 Feb 18:30 GMT (London) [46:13]Green Software Development Karlsruhe: How Apps Can Emit Less CO₂ | 03 Mar (Karlsruhe) [46:22] Optimizing AI Inference: How to Cut Costs, Latency & Energy | 12 Mar 18:30 CET (Barcelona) [46:35] AI, the ultimate green software challenge | 12 Mar 8:30 GMT (Virtual) [46:48]AI & Sustainability | 12 Mar 15:00 AEDT (Sydney) [47:02]Green Software Practitioner Study Day - Silicon Brighton | 13 Mar (Brighton) [47:12]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This Week in Green Software, Chris Adams is joined by new co-hosts Kate Goldenring and Tzviya Siegman to explore the latest stories on their radars. They unpack Microsoft’s community-first AI infrastructure pledge, the rise of gas-powered data centers, and the hidden embodied emissions behind AI models and storage hardware. The conversation also dives into the energy cost of AI prompts, new research measuring real browser energy use, and emerging models like billing AI by the kilowatt-hour. Together, they examine how transparency, standards, and smarter engineering decisions can shape a more sustainable digital future.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteKate Goldenring: LinkedIn | WebsiteTzviya Siegman: LinkedIn | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:Building Community-First AI Infrastructure - Microsoft [05:00]Microsoft Pledged to Save Water in the A.I. Era - The New York Times [08:29]Building Community-First AI Infrastructure - Microsoft On the Issues Betting big on data centers, U.S. now leads world for new gas power development - Global Energy Monitor [13:56]The Robles v. Domino’s Settlement (And Why It Matters) [21:56]From FLOPs to Footprints: The Resource Cost of Artificial Intelligence [23:53]The Cost of Politeness in AI [29:54]Green Coding Solutions: webNRG Released [36:50]Energy-Aware Hosted Inference | Neuralwatt Portal [42:35]Resources:Environment Variables Ep 62: Greening Serverless w/ Kate Goldenring [11:24]Environment Variables Ep 104: OCP, Wooden Datacentres and Cleaning up Datacentre Diesel w/ Karl Rabe [12:16]GitHub - Green-Software-Foundation/real-time-cloud: Real Time Energy and Carbon Standards for Cloud Providers [14:56]Web Sustainability Guidelines | W3C [20:14]WCAG 2 Overview | Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) | W3C [21:00] Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification | GSF [23:22]Ecoinvent [27:06]Solar power in Finland - Energy [44:38]On using solar & batteries to provide 90% of the world population with 90% of their electricity demand for below 90 €/MWh | Chris Adams Solar and batteries can power the world How Did This State Become the Data Center Capital of the World?  Subsidizing the Cloud: U.S. State Incentives to Data Centers Scope True - Reality-Based Corporate Carbon Accounting For the Decarbonization webNRG GitHub - webNRG If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chris Skipper hosts Florent Morel and Joseph Cook to discuss Carmen on this Backstage episode. Built at Amadeus and now part of the GSF ecosystem, Carmen helps organizations measure software carbon emissions at both infrastructure and application levels using existing observability and FinOps data, all powered by the GSF Impact Framework. They discuss why granular, team-level emissions data matters, how Carmen works in practice, and how standardized, transparent measurements can turn sustainability insights into concrete engineering action.Learn more about our people:Chris Skipper: LinkedIn | WebsiteFlorent Morel: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteJoseph Cook: LinkedIn | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterResources:Open‑Source Carbon Measurement Engine: How Carmen Advances Sustainable Engineering | Amadeus  [00:30] How Amadeus engineers are contributing to a carbon-aware software industry? | Amadeus [03:08]Impact Framework | GSF [05:30]Environment Variables Ep 96 | Backstage: Impact Framework [07:48]Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification | GSF [17:13]GitHub - AmadeusITGroup/carmen: Open-source carbon measurement for cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes workloads. [20:48]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Anne Currie hosts Anna Forlati to discuss why sustainability is not a cost center but a business advantage. Drawing on her journey from UX designer to Head of Digital Sustainability and Impact, Anna explores how inclusive design, ESG strategy, and cultural change can make digital products more resilient, ethical, and profitable. From B Corps and EU regulation to GreenOps and AI efficiency, the conversation reframes sustainability as a mindset shift that aligns purpose, performance, and long term value.Learn more about our people:Anne Currie: LinkedIn | WebsiteAnna Forlati: LinkedIn | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterResources:Why inclusive products are green products - TetraLogical [11:57] Green AI: Hype or Hope? | Harvard Magazine GenAI Ecosystems Are Software, Not Magic: What It Takes to Build Something You Can Live With | by Wilco Burggraaf | Medium  If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, host Chris Adams is joined by Wilco Burggraaf and Robert Keus of GreenPT to unpack what greener prompting and transparent AI actually look like in practice. They discuss why most AI services hide their environmental impact, how GreenPT exposes real energy and carbon data to users, and why user behavior plays a major role in AI’s footprint. The conversation explores prompt length, session design, model efficiency, and the limits of chat-based AI, making a strong case for transparency, better defaults, and more purposeful use of AI if it’s going to scale responsibly.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteRobert Keus: LinkedIn | WebsiteWilco Burggraaf: LinkedIn | Medium | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterResources:GreenPT [01:14] Green Software - The Netherlands | Meetup [02:34]Scaleway [22:40]Neuralwatt [29:23]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chris Adams speaks with Tom Kerkhove of the Microsoft Azure API Management team about how thoughtful API design can reduce energy use and improve system efficiency. They discuss how API gateways, caching, throttling, and observability can cut unnecessary compute and data transfer, while also improving reliability and developer experience. The conversation shows how small architectural decisions at the API layer can have an outsized impact on cost, performance, and sustainability at scale.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteTom Kerkhove: LinkedIn | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterResources:Solar Protocol [02:33]KEDA [04:37] Azure API Management [10:01]Grid-aware websites - Green Web Foundation [20:37]Electricity Maps [23:25]Real Time Energy and Carbon Standard for Cloud Providers [26:17]Azure API Management | Microsoft Azure Blog [30:01]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Anne Currie is joined by Sara Bergman to explore what the shift to greener computing really looks like in practice, using .NET and modern CPU architectures as a concrete example. They unpack why moving from traditional x64 systems to more efficient ARM-based platforms can cut costs and carbon, how runtime environments like .NET make architectural transitions easier, and why staying up to date with platforms is essential for performance, security, and sustainability. Along the way, the conversation connects DevOps, modernization, and energy efficiency into a clear message: the green shift starts with building systems that are designed to change.Learn more about our people:Anne Currie: LinkedIn | WebsiteSara Bergman: LinkedIn | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterResources:Building Green Software [Book] [03:17]Environment Variables Ep 115 - Real Efficiency at Scale with Sean Varley [09:06]Environment Variables Ep 107 - Cloud Infrastructure, Efficiency and Sustainability [09:47]RISC vs CISC - GeeksforGeeks Microsoft .NET If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This Week in Green Software, Chris Adams and Asim Hussain round up the latest stories shaping sustainable tech. From new research on AI and energy use to policy shifts, tooling updates, and signals from the wider climate and software communities, the discussion connects the dots on what matters right now and why. It’s a fast-moving snapshot of the trends, tensions, and progress driving green software forward.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteAsim Hussain: LinkedInFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:AI Energy Score v2: Refreshed Leaderboard, now with Reasoning | Hugging Face [05:57]Digital Transformation, IT Cost Optimization & Sustainable IT Solutions | Antarctica [15:43]Scott’s Chamberlin of NeuralWatt’s survey link on charging for AI inference by the KWh, instead of by the token, to align incentives [29:16]Simplified European Sustainability Reporting Standards | ESG [31:10]Climate rift opens between Amazon and rivals in row over data centre power | Financial Times [40:46]Resources:SCI for AI spec referencing token use | GSF [14:35]Are these all the tokens we should be counting? Ismael Velasco’s talk at Green IO [25:57]GitHub: System Prompts for Grok chat assistant [28:36]Elon Musk's AI chatbot, Grok, started calling itself 'MechaHitler' | NPR [28:53]Wow tech firms STILL need to report their revenue from the oil and gas sector, even after reporting standards have been ‘simplified’? | Chris Adams [31:19]An E.E.D. update: Who is disclosing and who isn't ? - Green Web Foundation  [34:43]The secretive cabal of US polluters that is rewriting the EU’s human rights and climate law - SOMO [37:27][Draft] ESRS E1 - Climate Change If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Host Chris Adams talks with Adam Newman and Oli Winks of Root & Branch about their new Software Carbon Intensity Web model for measuring the real carbon footprint of websites. They break down why current methods miss the mark, how their bottom-up approach captures actual energy use across servers, networks and devices, and why better measurement can lead to smarter, lower-carbon choices for teams. It’s a candid look at what it really takes to make the web greener, and the tools that can help developers get there.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteAdam Newman: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteOliver Winks: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification | GSF [00:48]Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) For Web: Measuring energy and emissions of web applications [02:03]Kitemill [09:32]Cardamon | Root & Branch [12:56]GitHub - Root-Branch/cardamon-web-model [32:09]Green Metrics Tool | green-coding.io [43:18]Green Software Brighton | Meetup [58:09]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When artificial intelligence grows, so does its thirst. Chris Skipper hosts sustainability expert Valeria Salis, digging into the hidden cost of powering AI: the massive volumes of water needed to cool the data centers. From submerged servers off China’s coast to European communities pushing back on tech infrastructure, they discuss the environmental trade-offs and the push for solutions that keep innovation flowing without draining local resources.Learn more about our people:Chris Skipper: LinkedIn | WebsiteValeria Salis: LinkedIn | YouTube | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:China's HiCloud launches wind-powered underwater data center [07:21]Microsoft finds underwater datacenters are reliable and sustainable [24:26]Thirsty AI mega projects raise alarm in Europe’s driest regions [25:49] How datacenters are innovating with sustainability in mind [36:08]Resources:Green Software Italia 🌱 [03:18]Green Software Italia | LinkedIn Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) [11:06]Environment Variables Ep 59 | TWiGS: CNCF TAG Environmental Sustainability [11:25]Environment Variables Ep 14 | Community Clouds and Energy Islands with Dawn Nafus and Laura Watts [17:56]Green Software Movement [35:25] SCI for AI [41:16]Projects | GSF [41:46]  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Guest host Anne Currie speaks with Karthik Vaidhyanathan, Assistant Professor at IIIT Hyderabad, about integrating sustainability into AI development. They discuss how the world can balance digital growth with renewable energy goals and how AI systems can be designed to be energy-efficient rather than energy-intensive. Karthik shares insights from his research on sustainable AI and MLOps, including dynamically selecting and retraining models to cut energy use and costs without compromising performance. The conversation underscores the importance of dynamic system design and collaboration across academia, industry, and government to make sustainability a core principle in software engineering.Learn more about our people:Anne Currie: LinkedIn | WebsiteKarthik Vaidhyanathan: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterResources:Attention Is All You Need [06:34]Environment Variables Ep119 Backstage: The Green Software Movement Platform [13:16] SustAInd [33:01]HarmonE [36:00] SA4S @ SERC [36:33]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Guest host Anne Currie is joined by software engineer and sustainability advocate Julian Gommlich to explore how green practices can be embedded throughout the DevOps lifecycle. They discuss how modern operational practices like continuous delivery, automation, and agile iteration naturally align with sustainability goals, helping teams build more efficient, resilient, and energy-aware systems. The conversation covers real-world examples, from migrating to newer, more efficient software versions to understanding the carbon impact of data centers, and highlights why adopting a DevOps mindset is crucial for driving both environmental and business value in today’s rapidly changing digital landscape.Learn more about our people:Anne Currie: LinkedIn | WebsiteJulian Gommlich: LinkedIn | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterResources:Power in Numbers: Mapping the electricity grid of the future w/ Olivier Corradi [31:02] Electricity Maps [31:58]Google’s huge new Essex datacentre to emit 570,000 tonnes of CO2 a year [41:06] Compute Gardener SchedulerScalable Platform for Reporting Usage and Cloud Emissions Events:BetterSoftware – October 3 · Turin, ItalySustainable AI: Energy, Water, and the Future of Growth – October 6 · San Francisco, USA Sustainable Coding: Rust Meets the Right to Repair – October 16 · ’s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Host Chris Adams speaks with Didi Hoffmann, CTO of Green Coding Solutions, about building energy awareness into operating systems and making sustainability a first-class concern in software development. They discuss Didi’s journey from Linux kernel programming to climate-focused tech and many more!Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteDidi Hoffmann: LinkedIn | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterResources:Green Coding Solutions [02:32]BioHof Potsdam [07:12]PowerLetrics: An Open-Source Framework for Power and Energy Metrics for Linux | IEEE [12:32]GitHub - green-kernel/powerletrics: Powermetrics for Linux Green Metrics Tool | green-coding.io [13:13]Green Screen Catalyst Fund [17:15]ProcPower | Prototype Fund [22:19]Green Kernel Wordpress Plugin | GitHub [27:09]GitHub - Green-Software-Foundation/real-time-cloud: Real Time Energy and Carbon Standards for Cloud Providers [36:48] Blue Angel for Software- Certificate Services | green-coding.io [38:52]Paris Conference December 10th and 11th 2025 | Green IO [56:58]Green Kernel · GitHubWhy We’re Exploring SCI Disclosure Certification | GSF  Events:ecoCompute conference [59:41]Code: ENVIRONMENT-VARIABLES Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Guest host Anne Currie speaks with Boris Gamazaychikov, Head of AI Sustainability at Salesforce, about aligning artificial intelligence with environmental responsibility. They explore the wide range of energy impacts across AI models, the development of the AI Energy Score benchmarking tool, and why transparency is essential for sustainable choices. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

WIN FREE TICKETS TO GREEN IO LONDON:CLICK THIS LINK AND COMMENT BELOW TO WIN Learn more about our people:Chris Skipper: LinkedIn | WebsiteGosia Fricze: LinkedIn | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterResources:Green Software Movement | GSF [04:33] Green Software Practitioner Course | GSF [17:56] Environment Variables Podcast | Ep 84 Backstage: SOFT (Previously TOSS) Project [24:42] Events:Green IO London Conference September 23 & 24 2025 [20:37] Events - Green Software Movement | GSFIf you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Host Chris Adams is joined by Asim Hussain to explore the latest news from The Week in Green Software. They look at Hugging Face’s AI energy tools, Mistral’s lifecycle analysis, and the push for better data disclosure in the pursuit for AI sustainability. They discuss how prompt design, context windows, and model choice impact emissions, as well as the role of emerging standards like the Software Carbon Intensity for AI, and new research on website energy use. Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteAsim Hussain: LinkedIn | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:A Gift from Hugging Face on Earth Day: ChatUI-Energy Lets You See Your AI Chat’s Energy Impact Live [04:02]Our contribution to a global environmental standard for AI | Mistral AI [19:47]AI Energy Score Leaderboard - a Hugging Face Space by AIEnergyScore [30:42]Challenges Related to Approximating the Energy Consumption of a Website | IEEE [55:14]National Drought Group meets to address “nationally significant” water shortfall - GOV.UK Resources:GitHub - huggingface/chat-ui: Open source codebase powering the HuggingChat app [07:47]General policy framework for the ecodesign of digital services version 2024 [29:37]Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification Project | GSF [37:35]Neural scaling law - Wikipedia [45:26]Software Carbon Intensity for Artificial Intelligence | GSF [52:25]Announcement:Green Software Movement | GSF [01:01:45] If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!TRANSCRIPT BELOW:Asim Hussain: ChatGPT, they're all like working towards a space of how do we build a tool where people can literally pour junk into it, and it will figure something out. Whereas what we should be doing, is how do you use that context window very carefully. And it is like programming. Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host, Chris Adams. Hello and welcome to this week in Green Software where we look at the latest news in sustainable software development. I am joined once again by my friend and partner in crime or occasionally crimes, Asim Hussain, of the Green Software Foundation. My name is Chris Adams. I am the Director of Policy and Technology at the Green Web Foundation, no longer the executive director there,and, as we've moved to a co-leadership model. And, Asim, really lovely to see you again, and I believe this is the first time we've been on a video podcast together, right?Asim Hussain: Yeah. I have to put clothes on now, so, so that's,Chris Adams: That raises all kinds of questions to how intimate our podcast discussions were before. Maybe they had a different meaning to you than they did to me, actually.Asim Hussain: Maybe you didn't know I was naked, but anyway.Chris Adams: No, and that makes it fine. That's what, that's what matters. I also have to say, this is the first time we get to, I like the kind of rocking the Galactus style headphones that you've got on here.Asim Hussain: These are my, yeah, no, these are old ones that I posted recently. I actually repaired them. I got my soldering iron and I repaired the jack at the end there. So, I'm very proud of myself for having repaired. I had the right to repair. Chris. I had the right to repair it.Chris Adams: Yeah. This is why policy matters.Asim Hussain: I also have the capability.Chris Adams: Good. So you can get, so, good on you for saving a bunch of embodied carbon and, how that's calculated is something we might touch on. So, yes. So if you are new to this podcast, my friends, we're just gonna be reviewing some of the news and stories that are kinda showed up on our respective radars as we work in our kind of corresponding roles in both the Green Software Foundation and the Green Web Foundation.And hopefully this will be somewhat interesting or at least diverting to people as they wash their dishes whilst listening to us. So that's the plan. Asim, should I give you a chance to just briefly introduce what you do at the Green Software Foundation before I go into this?'Cause I realized, I've just assumed that everyone knows who you are. And I know who you are, but maybe there's people who are listening for the first time, for example.Asim Hussain: Oh yeah. So, yeah. So my name's Asim Hussain. I am a technologist by trade. I've been building software for several decades now. I formed the green software, yeah, Green Software Foundation, you know, four years ago. And, now I'm the executive director and I'm basically in charge of, yeah, just running the foundation and making sure we deliver against our vision of a future where software has zero harmful environmental impacts.Chris Adams: That's a noble goal to be working for. And Asim, I wanted to check. How long is it now? Is it three years or four years? 'Cause we've been doing this a while.Asim Hussain: We, yeah. So we just fin, well, four years was May, so yeah, four years. So next birthday's the fifth birthday.Chris Adams: Wow. Time flies when the world is burning, I suppose. Alright, so anyway, as per usual, what we'll do, we share all the show notes and any links that we discuss or projects we discuss, we'll do our damnedest to make sure that they're available for anyone who wants to continue their quest and learning more about sustainability in the field of software.And I suppose, Asim, it looks like you're sitting comfortably now. Should we start looking at some of the news stories?Asim Hussain: Let's go for it.Chris Adams: Alright. Okay. The first one we have, is a story from Hugging Face. This is actually a few months back, but it's one to be aware of if it missed you the first time. So, Hugging Face released a new tool called Chat UI Energy that essentially lets you see, the energy impact live from using a kind of chat session,a bit like ChatGPT or something like that. Asim, I think we both had a chance to play around with this, and we'll share a link to the actual story around this as well as the actual repo that's online. What do you think of this? what's your immediate take when you see this and have a little poke around with this? Asim Hussain: Well, it's good. I wanna make sure. It's a really nice addition to a chat interface. So just so the audience who's not seeing it, every time you do a prompt, it tells you the energy in, well, in watt hours, what I'm seeing right now. But then also, you know, some other stats as well.And then also kind of how much of a phone charge it is. And that's probably the most surprising one. I just did a prompt, which was 5.7% of a phone charge, which was, that's pretty significant. Actually, I dunno, is that significant? So, one of the things is, I'm trying to, what I'm trying to find out from it though is how does that calculation, 'cause that's my world, it's like, how does, what do you really mean by a calculation?Is it cumulative? Is it session based? Is it just, you know, how, what have you calculated in terms of the energy emissions? The little info on the side is just the energy of the GPU during inference. So it's not the energy of kind of anything else in the entire user journey of me using a UI to ask a prompt.But we also know that's probably the most significant. And I'm kind of quite interested in figuring out, as I'm prompting it, I'm one, I'm, one of the things I'm seeing is that every single prompt is actually, the emissions are bigger than the previous prompt. Oh no, it's not actually, that's not true.Yeah, it is.Chris Adams: Ah, this is the thing you've been mentioning about cumulative, Asim Hussain: Cumulative. Yeah. Which is a confusing one. 'Cause I've had a lot of people who are really very good AI engineers go, "Asim, no, that's not true." And other people going, "yeah, it kind of is true." But they've just optimized it to the point where the point at which you get hit with that is at a much larger number.But the idea is that there's, there, it used to be an n squared issue for your prompt and your prompt session history. So every time you put a new prompt in all of your past session history was sent with your next prompt. And if you are actually building, like a your own chat system, if you are actually building like your own chat solution for your company or wherever, that is typically how you would implement it as a very toy solution to begin with is just, you know, take all the texts that was previous and the new text and send it, in the next session.But I think what, they were explaining to me, which was actually in the more advanced solutions, you know, the ones from Claude or ChatGPT, there's a lot of optimization that happens behind the scenes. So it doesn't really, it doesn't really happen that way, but I was trying to figure out whether it happens with this interface and I haven't quite figured it out yet.Chris Adams: Oh, okay. So I think what you might be referring to is the fact that when you have like a GPU card or something like that, there's like new tokens and kind of cashed tokens, which are priced somewhat differently now. And this is one of the things that we've seen.'Cause it's using maybe a slightly different kind of memory, which might be slightly faster or is slightly kind of is slightly lower cost to service in that sense. Yeah. Okay. So this is one thing that we don't see. What I, the good news is we can share a link to this, for anyone listening, this source code is all on GitHub, so we can have a look at some of this.And one of the key things you'

In this episode of Environment Variables, host Chris Adams welcomes Scott Chamberlin, co-founder of Neuralwatt and ex-Microsoft Software Engineer, to discuss energy transparency in large language models (LLMs). They explore the challenges of measuring AI emissions, the importance of data center transparency, and projects that work to enable flexible, carbon-aware use of AI. Scott shares insights into the current state of LLM energy reporting, the complexities of benchmarking across vendors, and how collaborative efforts can help create shared metrics to guide responsible AI development.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteScott Chamberlin: LinkedIn | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:Set a carbon fee in Sustainability Manager | Microsoft [26:45]Making an Impact with Microsoft's Carbon Fee | Microsoft Report [28:40] AI Training Load Fluctuations at Gigawatt-scale – Risk of Power Grid Blackout? – SemiAnalysis [49:12]Resources:Chris’s question on LinkedIn about understanding the energy usage from personal use of Generative AI tools [01:56]Neuralwatt Demo on YouTube [02:04]Charting the path towards sustainable AI with Azure Machine Learning resource metrics | Will Alpine [24:53] NVApi - Nvidia GPU Monitoring API | smcleod.net [29:44]Azure Machine Learning monitoring data reference | Microsoft Environment Variables Episode 63 - Greening Serverless with Kate Goldenring [31:18]NVIDIA to Acquire GPU Orchestration Software Provider Run:ai [33:20]Run.AINVIDIA Run:ai Documentation  GitHub - huggingface/AIEnergyScore: AI Energy Score: Initiative to establish comparable energy efficiency ratings for AI models. [56:20]Carbon accounting in the Cloud: a methodology for allocating emissions across data center users If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!TRANSCRIPT BELOW:Scott Chamberlin: Every AI factory is going to be power constrained in the future. And so what does compute look like if power is the number one limiting factor that you have to deal with? Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host, Chris Adams. Hello and welcome to Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. We talk a lot about transparency on this podcast when talking about green software, because if you want to manage the environmental impact of software, it really helps if you can actually measure it.And as we've covered on this podcast before, measurement can very quickly become quite the rabbit hole to go down, particularly in new domains such as generative AI. So I'm glad to have our guest, Scott Chamberlain today here to help us navigate as we plum these depths. Why am I glad in particular?Well, in previous lives, Scott not only built the Microsoft Windows operating system power and carbon tracking tooling, getting deep into the weeds of measuring how devices consume electricity, but he was also key in helping Microsoft Azure work out their own internal carbon accounting standards. He then moved on to working at Intel to work on a few related projects, including work to expose these kinds of numbers in usable form to developers when people when making the chips that go in these servers. His new project Neuralwatt is bringing more transparency and control to AI language models.And a few weeks back when I was asking on LinkedIn for pointers on how to understand the energy usage from LLMs I use, he shared a link to a very cool demo showing basically the thing I was asking for: real-time energy usage figures from Nvidia cards directly in the interface of a chat tool. The video's in the show notes if you're curious.And it is really, cool. So Scott, thank you so much for joining us. Is there anything else that I missed that you'd like to add for the intro before we dive into any of this stuff?Scott Chamberlin: No, that sounds good.Chris Adams: Cool. Well, Scott, thank you very much once again for joining us. If you are new to this podcast, just a reminder, we'll try and share a link to every single project in the show notes.So if there are things that are particularly interest, go to podcast.greensoftware.foundation and we'll do our best to make sure that we have links to any papers, projects, or demos like we said. Alright, Scott, I've done a bit of an intro about your background and everything like that, and you're calling me from a kind of pleasingly green room today.So maybe I should ask you, can I ask where you're calling from today and a little bit about like the place?Scott Chamberlin: So I live in the mountains just west of Denver, Colorado, in a small town called Evergreen. I moved here in the big reshuffles just after the pandemic, like a lot of people wanted to shift to a slightly different lifestyle. And so yeah, my kids are growing here, going to high school here, and yeah, super enjoy it.It gives me quick ability to get outside right outside my door.Chris Adams: Cool. All right. Thank you very much for that. So it's a green software podcast and you're calling from Evergreen as well, in a green room, right? Wow.Scott Chamberlin: That's right. I have a, I actually have a funny story I want to share from the first time I was on this podcast. It was me and Henry Richardson from Watttime talking about carbon awareness. And I made some focus on how the future, I believe, everything's going to be carbon aware. And I used a specific example of my robot vacuum of like, it's certainly gonna be charging in a carbon aware way at some point in the future.I shared the podcast with my dad and he listened to it and he comes back to me and says, "Scott, the most carbon reduced vacuum is a broom."Chris Adams: Well, it, he's not wrong. I mean, it's a, it's manual but it does definitely solve the problem and it's definitely got lower embedded carbon, that's for sure, actually.Scott Chamberlin: Yeah.Chris Adams: Cool. So Scott, thank you very much for that. Now, I spoke a little bit about your kind of career working in ginormous trillion dollar or multi-billion dollar tech companies, but you are now working at a startup Neuralwatt, but you mentioned before, like during, in our prep call, you said that actually after leaving a couple of the big corporate jobs, you spent a bit of time working on like, building your own version of like what a cloud it might be.And I, we kind of ended up calling it like, what I called it Scott Cloud, like the most carbon aware, battery backed up, like really, kind of green software, cloud possible and like pretty much applying everything you learned in your various roles when you were basically paid to become an expert in this.Can you talk a little bit about, okay, first of all, if it's, if I should be calling it something other than Scott Cloud and like are there any particular takeaways you did from that? Because that's had like quite an interesting project and that's probably what I think half of the people who listened to this podcast, if they had essentially a bunch of time to build this, they'd probably build something similar.So yeah. Talk. I mean, why did you build that and, yeah, what are the, were there any things you learned that you'd like to share from there?Scott Chamberlin: Sure. So, I think it's important to know that I had spent basically every year from about 2019 through about 2022, trying to work to add features to existing systems to make them more, have less environmental impact, lower CO2, both embodied as well as runtime carbon.And I think it's, I came to realize that adding these systems on to existing systems is always going to come with a significant amount of compromises or significant amount of challenges because, I mean, I think it's just a core principle of carbon awareness is that there is going to be some trade off with how the system was already designed.And a lot of times it's fairly challenging to navigate those trade offs. I tend to approach them fairly algorithmically, doing optimization on them, but I had always in the back of my mind thought about what would a system look like if the most important principle that we were designing the system from was to minimize emissions? Like if that was the number one thing, and then say performance came second, reliability came second, security has to come first before everything. There's not a lot of tradeoffs you have to make with carbon awareness and security. So I started thinking, I'm like, "what does a data center architecture look like if this is the most important thing?"So of course, starts with the lowest, it's not the lowest, it's the highest performance-per-watt hardware you can get your hands on. And so really serving the landscape of really what that looked like. Architecting all the, everything we know about carbon awareness into the platform so that developers don't necessarily have to put it into their code, but get to take advantage of it in a fairly transparent and automatic way. And so you end up having things like location shifting as a fundamental principle of how your platform looks to a developer. So, as the idea was, we'd have a data center in France and a data center in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, where you have fairly non-correlated solar and wind values, but you also have very green base loads, so you're not trying to overcome your base load from the beginning.But that time shifting was b

Anne Currie is joined by Sean Varley, Chief Evangelist and VP of Business Development at Ampere Computing, a leader in building energy-efficient, cloud-native processors. They unpack the energy demands of AI, why power caps and utilization matter more than raw compute, and how to rethink metrics like performance-per-rack for a greener digital future. Sean also discusses Ampere’s role in the AI Platform Alliance, the company’s partnership with Rakuten, and how infrastructure choices impact the climate trajectory of AI.Learn more about our people:Anne Currie: LinkedIn | WebsiteSean Varley: LinkedIn | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterResources:Ampere Cloud Native Processors – Ultra-efficient ARM-based chips powering cloud and edge workloads [02:30]AI Platform Alliance – Coalition promoting energy-efficient AI hardware [04:55]Ampere + Rakuten Case Study – Real-world deployment with 36% less energy per rack [05:50]Green Software Foundation Real Time Cloud Project – Standardizing real-time carbon data from cloud providers [15:10]Software Carbon Intensity Specification – Measuring the carbon intensity of software [17:45]FinOps Foundation – Financial accountability in cloud usage, with sustainability guidance [24:20]Kepler Project – Kubernetes power usage monitoring [26:30]LLaMA Models by Meta [29:10]Anthropic’s Claude AI [31:25]Anne Currie, Sara Bergman & Sarah Hsu: Building Green Software [34:00]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!TRANSCRIPT BELOW:Sean Varley: Because at the end of the day, if you want to be more sustainable, then just use less electricity. That's the whole point, right. Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host, Chris Adams. Anne Currie: Hello and welcome to the World of Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software. So I'm your guest host today. It's not, you're not hearing the usual dulcet tones of Chris Adams. My name is Anne Currie. And today we'll be diving into a pressing and timely topic, how to scale AI infrastructure sustainably in a world where energy constraints are becoming a hard limit. And that means that we are gonna be, have to be a little bit more clever and a little bit more careful when we choose the chips we run on. So it's tempting to believe that innovation alone will lead us towards greener compute, but in reality, real sustainability gains happen when efficiency becomes a business imperative when performance per watt, cost and carbon footprint are all measured and all have weight. So, that's where companies like Ampere come in, with cloud native energy efficient approaches to chip design. They're rethinking how we power the AI boom, not just faster but smarter. It's a strategy that aligns directly with Green Software Foundation's mission to reduce carbon emissions from the software lifecycle, particularly in the cloud. So in this episode, we'll explore what this looks like at scale and what we can learn from Ampere's approach to real world efficiency. So what did it take? What does it take to make an AI ready infrastructure that's both powerful, effective, and sustainable? Let's find out. And today we have with us Sean Varley from Ampere.So Sean, welcome to the show. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?Sean Varley: Yeah, absolutely Anne, and thanks first for having me on the podcast. I'm a big fan, so, I'm looking forward to this conversation. So I'm the chief evangelist of Ampere Computing. And, I, now what that means is that we run a lot of the ecosystem building and all of the partnership kind of, works that go on to support our silicon products in the marketplace.And also, build a lot of awareness right around some of these concepts you introduced. You know, all of the, you know, kind of building out that awareness around sustainability and power efficiency and how that also really kinda works, within different workload contexts and workload context change over time.So all of those sorts of things are kind of in scope, for the evangelism role.Anne Currie: That's, that is fantastic. So I'll just introduce myself a little bit as well. My name is Anne Currie. If you haven't heard the podcast before, I am one of the authors of O'Reilly's new book, Building Green Software, which I, as I always say, everybody who's listening to this podcast should read Building Green Software.That was, that is entirely why we wrote the book. I'm also the CEO of the training and Green Consulting Company as Strategically Green. So, hit me up on LinkedIn if you want to talk a little bit about training consultancy, but back to the, back to the podcast. Oh, and I need to remember that everything we'll be talking about today, there will be links about it in the show notes.So you don't need to worry about writing down URLs or anything. Just look at the show notes before. So, now, I'm actually gonna start off the question by harking, start off the podcast by harking back to somebody that we had on the podcast a couple of months ago. A chap called, Charles Humble. And his, the assertion that he was making was that we all need to wake up to the fact that there isn't just one chip anymore, there isn't a default chip anymore that everybody uses and is kind of good enough for the best in all circumstances to use. when you are, setting up infrastructure, or in the cloud for example, and you have the dropdown that picks witch chip you're going use, the defaults might be Intel, for example. That is no longer a no-brainer, that you just go with the default. There are lots and lots of options, to the extent that, I mean, Ampere is a new chip company that decided to go into the market. So one of the questions that I have is why? You know, what gap did you see that it was worth coming in to fill?Because 10 years ago we would've said there was no real gap, wouldn't we?Sean Varley: That's right. Yeah. Actually it was a much more homogenous ecosystem back in those days. You know, and I, full disclosure, I came from Intel. I did a lot of time there. But about seven years, six years ago, I chose to come to Ampere. and part of this was the evolution of the market, right?The cloud market came in and changed a lot of different things, because there's kind of classically, especially in server computing, there's sort of the enterprise and the cloud and the cloud of course has had a lot of years to grow now. And the way that the cloud has evolved was to, really kind of, you know, push all of the computingto the top of its performance, the peak performance that you could get out of it. But there, you know, nobody really paid attention to power. Going back, you know, 10, 15, 20 years, nobody cared. And those were in the early days of Moore's law. And, part of what happened with Moore's Law is as frequencies, you know, grew then so did performance, you know, linearly.And I think that sort of trained into the industry a lot of complacency. And that complacency then became more ossified into the, you know, the way that people architected and what they paid attention to, metrics that they paid attention to when they built chips. But going back about seven, eight years, we actually saw that there was a major opportunity to get equal or better performance for about half the power. And that's kind of what forms some of our interest in building a company like Ampere. Now, of course, Ampere, since its inception has been about sustainable computing and, me being personally sort of in interested in sustainability and green technology and those sorts of thingsjust outside of the, my profession, you know, I, was super happy to come to a company like Ampere that had that in its core. Anne Currie: And that's very interesting. So really and Ampere, your chip is a, is an X86 chip, so it's not competing against ARM is more competing against Intel and AMD.Sean Varley: It's actually, it is an ARM chip. It's a, it's based on the ARM instruction set. And, yeah, so it's kind of an interesting dynamic, right? There was, there's been a number of different compute architectures that have been put into the marketplace. and the X86 instruction set classically by Intel and a MD who followed them, have dominated the marketplace, right?And, well at least they've dominated the server marketplace. Now, ARM has traditionally been in mobile handsets, embedded computing, things like this. But part of where the, that architecture was built and its roots were grown up in more power-conscious markets, you know, because anything running on a battery you want to have be pretty power miserlyAnne Currie: Yeah.Sean Varley: to use the word. So yeah, the ARM instruction set and the ARM architecture did offer us some opportunities to get a lift when we first, when we were a young company, but it doesn't necessarily have that much of a bearing on overall what we can do for sustainability, because there's many things that we can do for sustainability and the instruction set of the architecture is only one of them.And it's a much smaller one. I, it is probably way too detailed to get into on this podcast, but it is one factor and so yes, we are ARM instruction set based and about four years back, we actually started creating our own course, on the instruction set. And that's sort of been an evolution for us because we wanted to maintain this focus on sustainability, low power consumption, and of course, along w