Add carbon emissions reporting post (#2080)

content/news/2023-07-11-carbon-emissions-reporting/index.md

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+---
+title: "Carbon Emissions Reporting in Galaxy"
+tease: "Dynamic carbon emissions reporting for jobs in Galaxy"
+hide_tease: false
+authors: "Rendani Gangazhe"
+date: "2023-07-11"
+tags: ["UI/UX", highlight"]
+subsites: [global, all]
+---
+
+Hello, I'm Rendani, a front-end developer and computer science student working in the Galaxy Freiburg team. For my bachelor project, I had the pleasure of
+implementing the carbon emissions reporting feature for jobs in Galaxy.
+
+## Why calculate carbon emissions in the first place?
+
+As we know, cloud computing doesn't come for free. While storing a few files on your local computer may not have a significant carbon footprint,
+running large bioinformatic workflows can have a substantial impact. During my research for this project, I was surprised to learn about the various
+factors that effect carbon emissions, such as the [power usage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_usage_effectiveness)
+of the data center housing your server and the [carbon intensity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_intensity) of the country its running in.
+Algorithm runtime, hardware specifications and geographical location all have an impact on how "green" your computations are.
+
+## What's new
+
+Carbon emissions reporting in Galaxy is based off of the work done by the [Green Algorithms Project](https://www.green-algorithms.org/)
+and in particular their implementation of the ["carbon footprint calculator"](http://calculator.green-algorithms.org/). Our implementation has
+been slightly adjusted to better fit our use case. Additionally, some of our carbon emissions reporting is based off of calculations done by the
+[United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)](https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-calculator-calculations-and-references).
+
+Currently, whenever you run a job in Galaxy and navigate to the dataset details section of that job, you're presented with a carbon emissions summary
+detailing the estimated CO2 output and energy usage of that job. Additionally, we compare your job's carbon footprint to things like the distance driven in a car
+or the amount of smartphones you could have charged given your job's energy usage. This helps make the numbers more relatable. Here's an example carbon emissions report:
+
+<div style="display: flex; justify-content: center; align-items: center;">
+    <img src="./ui.png" alt="An image of carbon emissions reporting UI" width="60%" />
+</div>
+
+## Implementation details
+
+In order to estimate a job's carbon footprint, we first compute its energy usage in watts. We consider metrics like the job runtime (in hours),
+its memory usage (in MiB) and hardware specific information about the server running your job. In particular, make use of information like the
+number of compute cores allocated to the job, the total available cores and the [TDP (Thermal Design Power)](https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/tdp-thermal-design-power-definition,5764.html)
+of the server's CPU. We also assume that 100% of each core allocated is used.
+
+Since hardware specifications vary greatly and that we can't always assume that this information is provided, we estimate the server's hardware configuration
+by matching your job's CPU and/or memory usage to a comparable general purpose [AWS EC2 instance](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/).
+EC2 offers a wide range of server configurations allowing us to cover more real-world situations.
+
+Once we have the information needed, we calculate the power usage of the CPU and memory in watts. For each component, the respective power usage is
+the product of the amount of allocated resources, a [power usage effectiveness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_usage_effectiveness) value and a power usage factor.
+For CPUs, the power usage factor is the CPU TDP per core and, for memory, we use a reference average [power draw constant](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3076113.3076117)
+of 0.375 W/GiB from the "Carbon Footprint Calculator". Here's what that calculation looks like:
+
+```
+    memory_allocated_in_gibibyte = memory_allocated_in_mebibyte / 1024
+    tdp_per_core = cpu_TDP / cpu_core_count
+    normalized_tdp_per_core = tdp_per_core * cores_allocated_to_job
+
+    power_needed_cpu = pue * normalized_tdp_per_core
+    power_needed_memory = pue * memory_allocated_in_gibibyte * memory_power_usage_constant
+    total_power_needed = power_needed_cpu + power_needed_memory
+```
+
+The power usage is then converted into energy usage (in kWh) by factoring in the job runtime (in hours):
+
+```
+    energy_needed_cpu = runtime * power_needed_cpu / 1000
+    energy_needed_memory = runtime * power_needed_memory / 1000
+    total_energy_needed = runtime * total_power_needed / 1000
+```
+
+Finally, we convert the energy usage into estimated carbon emissions (in metric units CO2e) by multiplying the carbon intensity of the server location.
+CO2e represents other green house gases that have the same global warming effect as a metric unit of carbon dioxide, while carbon intensity is
+a measure of how environmentally friendly the energy production is in a particular country. The carbon intensity is dependent on geographical location,
+so Galaxy allows admins to specify the geographical location of the server running the Galaxy instance. In the current implementation, we assume
+that all jobs are run in the same geographical location as the configured location.
+
+```
+    cpu_carbon_emissions = energy_needed_cpu * carbon_intensity
+    memory_carbon_emissions = energy_needed_memory * carbon_intensity
+    total_carbon_emissions = total_energy_needed * carbon_intensity
+```
+
+We compare your job's total carbon emissions with [values calculated by the EPA](https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-calculator-calculations-and-references).
+When calculating the equivalent distance driven, we use the reference values from the Green Algorithms Project's "Carbon Footprint Calculator".
+
+```
+    gasoline_consumed = total_carbon_emissions / gasoline_emissions_as_per_epa
+    carbon_carbon_savings_by_using_leds = total_carbon_emissions / led_carbon_savings_as_per_epa
+    equivalent_km_in_eu = total_carbon_emissions / average_passenger_car_emissions_eu
+    equivalent_km_in_us = total_carbon_emissions / average_passenger_car_emissions_us
+    smartphones_charged = total_carbon_emissions / smartphone_charged_emissions_as_per_epa
+    tree_months = total_carbon_emissions / tree_year * 12
+```
+
+## Configuration options
+
+The Galaxy configuration interface has been extended to allow admins customize the carbon emissions reporting behavior and improve estimation accuracy
+The following flags were added:
+
+-   `geographical_server_location_code` an [ISO 3166](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166) code specifying the geographical location of the Galaxy instance.
+-   `power_usage_effectiveness` the PUE value to use in carbon emissions calculations.
+-   `carbon_emission_estimates` a feature toggle flag allowing the to be completely disabled when needed.
+
+As mentioned, we assume that jobs are run in the same geographical location as the configured Galaxy server location. An example of a galaxy instance
+configured with a location looks as follows:
+
+<div style="display: flex; justify-content: center; align-items: center;">
+    <img src="./set-location.png" alt="" width="50%"/>
+</div>
+
+## Next steps
+
+It would be interesting to consider computations using GPU cores, for jobs that use them, or to look into estimating data storage and transfer emissions for
+file upload jobs. Another useful feature would be calculating the total carbon emissions of an entire history or specific workflow.
+
+## References
+
+-   Lannelongue, L., Grealey, J., Inouye, M., Green Algorithms: Quantifying the Carbon Footprint of Computation. Adv. Sci. 2021, 8, 2100707. [https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202100707](https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202100707)
+-   "Greenhouse Gases Equivalencies Calculator - Calculations And References | US EPA". 2015. US EPA. [https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-calculator-calculations-and-references](https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-calculator-calculations-and-references).