RCDS Goes Green and Becomes Green Office Certified

Northwestern is dedicated to creating a greener campus and getting there requires effort from students, faculty, and staff. At the start of the year, the Northwestern IT Research Computing and Data Services (RCDS) team took steps to contribute to a greener, more sustainable campus by becoming Green Office Certified via sustainNU.

While recycling, reducing waste, and conserving power are important steps to being more sustainable, the RCDS team was largely motivated to be Green Office Certified due to the environmental impact of technology.

Going Green

Leading this charge for RCDS was Sophie van Genderen, computational specialist associate—who completed a master’s degree in informatics with a focus on environmental sustainability—and Emilio Lehoucq, data scientist—who learned about the certification program via HR’s well-being programs. Sophie and Emilio partnered with Jackie Milhans, director of research computing and data, and Letty Vega, IT business manager, to bring this effort to life.

“I was very excited when I came across the Green Office program. It seemed like a great opportunity to continue working on environmental well-being while creating a space to think about what we do as a team and how we can promote more sustainable practices across the research community,” said Emilio Lehoucq.

After meeting with the Green Office program, the RCDS green team hosted a staff meeting to inform the broader department about these efforts and get team buy-in.

The Green Office Certification program features a checklist of more than 30 ways to implement sustainable practices in an office. To receive certification, an office must complete a minimum of 24 of these steps.

In the certification process, RCDS made Green Office improvements, including reminders around the office, K-cup recycling program, reusable plates and utensils, timed power strips, and ample recycling bins.

Beyond the office, RCDS plans to continue zero-waste efforts at its annual CoDEx symposium by encouraging participants to bring their own water bottles and be mindful of single use items throughout the event. The team also plans to send regular communication reminders to their staff about community-wide green events and efforts, like the bike to work challenge and Earth Month.

"The nature of what we do requires a massive amount of energy consumption and generates heat. It is only responsible to provide researchers with more sustainable options. We hope students can take these practices forward to their future institutions. And we hope to share our successes with other research computing and data centers at other institutions to broaden the impact of these efforts,” said Jackie Milhans.

Technology and the Environment

Since a lot of the work RCDS does is in a client (student, faculty, and staff researchers) facing role, RCDS has made commitments to bring green sustainability to its services and operations both internally and externally to the Northwestern community.

Data Science, Statistics, and Visualization (DSSV)

The DSSV team within RCDS hosts a lot of workshops on programming and data science. To ensure that workshop attendees are thinking about the environmental impact of their workflows, DSSV has added a slide about the environmental impact of AI in all AI workshops. Additionally, the team started using environmental datasets for some workshop demonstrations, and they plan to host workshops on topics at the intersection of their services and sustainability, like using LLMs locally and profiling Python code for energy consumption.

The team is also opening up discussions about the best practices for generative AI, for example, about what is a responsible use of tools such as ChatGPT and Dall-E 2 considering their energy consumption. DSSV plans to include information about sustainability in student-employee handbooks.

Research Data Management (RDM)

It’s easy to overlook the environmental impact of data storage; luckily, the RDM team has not. The team is making efforts to reduce its on-premise data storage footprint by providing additional data storage options, such as cloud-based archival, to reduce local storage demands and to lower data center energy consumption.

To further reduce the green impact, the team is working with Northwestern IT Cyberinfrastructure colleagues to empower researchers to increase efficient use of data storage services by identifying potential duplicate and inactive datasets. RDM plans to also provide principal investigators with actionable reports to support data-retention decisions and is exploring ways to make it easier for researchers to move data to lower energy and lower cost storage for inactive data.

In addition to the exploration of new data storage services and support, RDM will also promote sustainable data practices by providing researchers with education to adopt efficient data storage strategies and support data management practices that minimize the environmental impact.

Research Computing Services (RCS)

High-performance computing (HPC) systems, like Quest, are a secure, reliable, and powerful option for researchers who need to run compute-and data-intensive applications. However, HPC systems use a significant amount of energy. To support researchers using Quest to improve resource efficiency—while not stifling research innovation—RCS is working on providing improved job statistics and utilization information, oversubscription notifications, and usage reports in understandable units.

For example, data centers and high-performance computing facilities emit 100 megatons of CO2 per year, which is similar to the American commercial aviation sector’s annual emissions.

The RCS team provides extensive documentation for researchers to use computing resources like remote desktop environments, HPC resources, and providing research software. In the same vein, a central sustainability and resource efficiency guide is being developed and will be added to current documentation.

Like DSSV, the team will also include sustainability information and education in its workshops regarding optimization and benefits to parallelizing code to minimize energy usage.

How to Become Green Office Certified

Becoming Green Office Certified is a great way for departments and offices to learn more about green practices and put them into action. The last item in the Green Office checklist leaves room for innovation and customization to the office’s function and role. For RCDS, that meant developing sustainability guidelines and actions to reduce the environmental impact of its technology, but it might look different for another team.

“The flexibility of the checklist allowed us to tailor our approach, leading us to focus on finding ways to reduce the environmental impact of our HPC resources, data management, and data science efforts. By optimizing resource usage, promoting efficient data practices, and educating researchers on sustainability, we hope to make environmentally responsible computing a core part of our mission,” said Sophie van Genderen.

If you or your team are interested in becoming Green Office Certified or learning more about the process, read more, and contact sustainNU to start the process.