Call for Papers: "WELCom: Workshop on Efficiency, Longevity, and Circularity for more sustainable cOMputing", part of the HiPEAC conference 2027, held on Jan 18, 2027 – Jan 20, 2027 in Glasgow, United Kingdom.
frugalcomputing
- The current projections for "AI" data centres are 10x growth in 10 years, 100x in twenty years (26% year-on-year growth), in line with the expressed ambitions of e.g. Sam Altman and Michael Dell.
- However, that would require chip production to increase 100x as well. This is why Altman called for 7 trillion dollars investment in the semiconductor industry.
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#AI #genAI #FrugalComputing
# Frugal computing revisited
The aim of frugal computing is to keep a liveable planet for everyone.
I wrote my "frugal computing" position paper (https://limited.systems/articles/frugal-computing/) in 2020.
It is hard to imagine that the notion predates the AI craze, but even without AI, back in 2020 emissions from computing were rising steeply. AI just made it infinitely worse.
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RE: https://scholar.social/@wim_v12e/115179142615575786
I am really happy that my paper
"Modelling Scenarios for Carbon-aware Geographic Load Shifting of Compute Workloads"
has now been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing.
As expected, it was rather a fraught process, but it only took 9 months and two revisions.
Final paper has not been published yet but I have updated the preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07043
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I want to share something because it has made me happy but also because it gives hope: academics are citing my "Frugal Computing" paper. This is remarkable because it only exists as a preprint and was not published in any reputable venue (*). I put it on arXiv in 2023, and of all paper I published since then it has the most citations (**).
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As it is now about five years since I wrote my "Frugal Computing" article, and meanwhile a lot of people have had occasion to misuse the term or at least misinterpret my intent, I felt it was time to revisit the concept.
https://limited.systems/articles/frugal-computing-revisited/
tl;dr: It's about sufficiency, and not squandering resources. And the aim is to keep a liveable planet supporting an inclusive global society.