The Sunk Carbon Fallacy: Rethinking Carbon Footprint Metrics for Effective Carbon-Aware Scheduling
Noman Bashir, Varun Gohil, Anagha Belavadi Subramanya, Mohammad Shahrad, David Irwin, Elsa Olivetti, Christina Delimitrou
Abstract
The rapid increase in computing demand and corresponding energy consumption have focused attention on computing's impact on the climate and sustainability. Prior work proposes metrics that quantify computing's carbon footprint across several lifecycle phases, including its supply chain, operation, and end-of-life. Industry uses these metrics to optimize the carbon footprint of manufacturing hardware and running computing applications. Unfortunately, prior work on optimizing datacenters' carbon footprint often succumbs to the sunk cost fallacy by considering embodied carbon emissions (a sunk cost) when making operational decisions (i.e., job scheduling and placement), which leads to operational decisions that do not always reduce the total carbon footprint.