Measuring job's CO2 footprint

It is possible to have an estimation of the CO2 footprint of a job running on the clusters.

Green Algorithms

The methodolgy is based on Green Algorithms developed by Loïc Lannelongue. He developed the package GreenAlgorithms4HPC which is a plugin to process the accounting information of a cluster HPC and provide an estimation of CO2 footprint of cluster usage.

How to use it

You need to load the following module:

module load gahpc

And then you can check your CO2 footprint for a period of time:

green_hpc -S 2025-11-24 -E 2025-11-25

The following output is generated:

        #################################                                                                              
        #                               #                                                                              
        #  Carbon footprint on curnagl  #
        #       - user: cruiz1 -        #
        #   (2025-11-24 / 2025-11-25)   #                                                                                      #                               #
        #################################                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                         
                                                                                                                                                         
              --------------                                                
             |   51 gCO2e   |                                                                                                                            
              --------------                                                                                                                             
                                                                                                                                                         
    ...This is equivalent to:                                               
         - 0.055 tree-months                                                
         - driving 0.29 km                                                  
         - 0.0 flights between Paris and London

There are several options to filter jobs that you can check with:

green_hpc -h 

How precise is the estimation?

The estimation does not take into account CO2 produced during manufacturing. It deals related with the power used during usage of computing. The power usages is based on the TDP (Termal Desing Power) information providaded by the manufacturer. This value is a limit of the power comsomption a CPU, GPU could have. The computing value is:

Power consumption = time * (resources 1 * TDP + resources_2* TPD + ...)

Results of some tests:

config	appli	GA mesured	real
cpu 48 cores	cpu benchmark NAS	0.343	0.3017
2 gpu A100	julia heat equation	0.355	0.350
2 gpu A100	LLM inference	0.376	0.234