Scientific research is unveiling the secrets of the universe and helping us fight disease, but at the same time, it can be extremely energy intensive. Research laboratories use up to 10 times more energy per square metre than a typical office. While lab waste and energy usage are known issues for experimental labs that generate data, computational labs that analyse these data are also starting to worry about their energy usage. As science increasingly relies on big data and AI tools, the carbon footprint of computational work is on the rise. To control this trend, a coordinated approach is necessary. A useful framework A group of scientists, including EMBL-EBI colleagues, have put forward a set of principles for how the computational science community could make its practices more environmentally sustainable. GREENER principles Governance Responsibility Estimation Energy and embodied impacts New collaborations Education Research “We all know that our travel and diet choices affect our carbon footprint. As scientists, we should also be mindful of the silent and unintended environmental consequences of our computational work,” said Loïc Lannelongue, Research Associate at the University of Cambridge. “The GREENER principles are a good starting point for understanding and mitigating this impact.” Build once, reuse many times Environmentally sustainable computational science is a nascent field with many opportunities. It covers a wide range of topics, from writing efficient code to making data and software tools reusable, so scientists don’t have to spend time and energy on recreating them for each new experiment. Take, for example, the AlphaFold software which has been used to calculate over 200 million protein structure predictions. All these predictions are now freely available in the AlphaFold database, jointly developed by Google DeepMind and EMBL-EBI, meaning that individual labs from all over the world don’t have to spend additional computational resources calculating them over and over again. A coordinated approach “The most surprising thing to me is how little research has been done so far in environmentally sustainable computing,” explained Alex Bateman, Team Leader at EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). “There are so many opportunities for making computational research more sustainable, but at the moment we’re mostly seeing grassroots initiatives. If we want to see real impact, then researchers, organisations, and funders need to join forces and coordinate efforts.” Watch a webinar delivered by Loïc Lannelongue about the environmental impact of computational biology.
Antrag des Abg. Albrecht Schütte u.a. CDU Begründung In der Studie „Sektorziele 2030 und klimaneutrales Baden-Württemberg 2040 −Teilbericht Sektorziele 2030“ wird vorausgesetzt, dass bis 2030 ein Zementwerk an CCS angeschlossen wird und bis 2040 fünf. Mit
zum Artikel gehenDas Fedora-Projekt hat Release 33 seiner Linux-Distribution veröffentlicht. Es soll unter anderem mit einem nahtloseren Design, einem via BTRFS verbesserten File-System und neuen Features für das Internet-of-Things (IoT) oder Edge-Computing überzeugen.
Time-resolved structural biology is an approach that aims at understanding in detail how molecules change their structure over time. While being more challenging than traditional static structural biology, time-resolved structural biology is rapidly devel
EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and Google DeepMind proudly present a significant update to the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database (AlphaFold DB) with new functionalities to make the data more discoverable. AlphaFold DB has expan
EMBL is an intergovernmental organisation with 28 member states. The laboratory also has a strong and deeply valued southern hemisphere connection; Australia has been an EMBL associate member state since 2008. EMBL Australia is a life science network