1st International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing (LOCO 2024)

https://www.sicsa.ac.uk/loco/loco2024/

3 December 2024 – hybrid event hosted in Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom 

The 1st International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing (LOCO 2024) aims to provide a forum for ideas, work, and criticism that aims to reduce the emissions from computing. We invite researchers and practitioners across research areas and application domains to take part and contribute to our workshop.

The main focus of the workshop is on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from computing. However, computing science research and practice that helps to reduce other emissions or to mitigate the effects of climate change in another ways is also in scope.

We welcome submissions that describe new ideas and visions, just as much as reports describing ongoing work, completed projects, and practical tools. In addition, we also welcome work that uncovers and criticises significant problems with established ways and emerging trends.

Topics of interest

Topics of interest for LOCO 2024 include but are not limited to:

• Measurements, testbeds, and simulation
  • carbon footprint estimation methodologies for compute resources and software systems
  • testbeds for sustainable and low carbon computing methods (e.g. co-simulation of computing and energy systems, hybrid testbeds, emulation)
• Sustainable software engineering
  • practices and tools for low carbon and sustainable software engineering
• Energy efficiency
  • energy-efficient programming languages and compilers (e.g. resource-aware type systems, low-overhead language implementations, energy-efficient compilation to heterogeneous systems)
  • energy-efficiency of applications, e.g. green AI/ML, big data analytics, search
• Hardware efficiency
  • cloud computing and virtualisation techniques to efficiently share compute resources
  • edge computing and other locality-aware approaches to reduce resource usage, energy consumption, and carbon emissions
  • load balancing, resource allocation, scheduling and placement, as well as other compute resource management mechanisms to improve resource usage
• Carbon awareness
  • carbon-aware and grid-aware load migration, time shifting, and scaling mechanisms
  • energy-efficient and carbon-aware networking
  • carbon-aware data centre design and operation
• Embodied carbon and circular economy
  • methods for extending the useful life of compute resources (e.g. reliable monitoring and early-warning systems for long-living hardware)
  • low-carbon and sustainable data storage and caching
  • circular economy: compute resource reuse and recycling
• Frugal computing
  • frugality/sufficiency, demand reduction, degrowth computing
  • human-computer interaction that encourages considerate use of ultimately limited computing resources
  • sociological and economical aspects of low-carbon computing, e.g. end-user behaviour, business models
• Computing for climate science, other scientific computing, and energy informatics
  • effective programming and efficient execution of software for climate science
  • sustainable scientific computing and workflow management
  • methods and tools for forecasting weather and energy availability

LOCO 2024 is an initiative of the Scottish Programming Languages Institute (SPLI), supported by the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA), and was inspired by the Programming for the Planet (PROPL) workshop.

Important Dates

Extended abstracts and workshop presentations:

• extended abstract submission: 1 Oct 2024
• lightning talk abstract submission: 8 Oct 2024
• notification of acceptance: 5 Nov 2024- workshop day: 3 Dec 2024

Post-proceedings:

• proceedings paper submissions: 28 Feb 2025
• notifications of acceptance: 11 Apr 2025
• revised final camera-ready papers: 6 Jun 2025

  PC Chairs

• Wim Vanderbauwhede, University of Glasgow
• Lauritz Thamsen, University of Glasgow

Program Committee Members

• Mohit Arora, BBC & King’s College London
• Noman Bashir, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Ivona Brandić, Vienna University of Technology
• Matthew Chalmers, University of Glasgow
• Ruzanna Chitchyan, University of Bristol
• Neil Chue Hong, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre
• Tim Cowlishaw
• Istvan David, McMaster University
• Pierre-Alain Fayolle, The University of Aizu
• Adrian Friday, Lancaster University
• Levin Fritz
• Bruno García A. da V., Universidad de Chile
• Saeid Ghafouri, Queen’s University Belfast
• Timo Hönig, Ruhr University Bochum
• Brendan Howell, Independent Artist & Reluctant Engineer
• Anish Jindal, Durham University
• Loïc Lannelongue, University of Cambridge
• Ulf Leser, Humboldt University of Berlin
• Clarissa Littler, Portland Community College
• Hans-Wolfgang Loidl, Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh
• Anil Madhavapeddy, University of Cambridge
• Lionel Morel, Université de Lyon
• Dominic Orchard, University of Kent
• Daniel Schien, University of Bristol
• Mike Sheldon, AgAnalyst Ltd
• Demetris Trihinas, University of Nicosia
• Andrew Turner, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre
• Amjad Ullah, Edinburgh Napier University
• Blesson Varghese, University of St Andrews
• Ismael Velasco, Adora Foundation
• Monica Vitali, Politecnico di Milano
• Laura Voinea, University of Glasgow
• Michele Weiland, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre
• Kelly Widdicks, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
• Philipp Wiesner, Technische Universität Berlin
• Noa Zilberman, University of Oxford

Submission of Papers

We follow a post-proceeding model: Authors initially submit extended abstracts of up to 2 pages, plus references. Authors of accepted extended abstracts will be expected to present at the workshop and will afterwards be invited to submit full workshop papers of up to 8 pages, plus references. Full workshop paper submissions will be reviewed again and, where possible, we will assign the same reviewers as for the extended abstracts. Where authors of accepted extended abstracts choose not to submit a full workshop paper, we will include the extended abstracts in our post-proceedings.

Reviewing will be non-blind: Authors should include their names, affiliations, and contact information, and reviews will include reviewer names.

All papers should use the ACM double-column format, using the most recent template, without ACM copyright information and without CCS concepts.

All papers will be made freely available on our website. The copyright will remain with the authors. However, we are encouraging workshop paper authors to include a CC license statement in their paper. If authors submit their paper on arXiv, they will be included in the arXiv-based Proceedings.

For more information please visit our website: https://www.sicsa.ac.uk/loco/loco2024/.

We welcome your submission to LOCO 2024 and are happy to answer any questions.Furthermore, please consider forwarding this call to other researchers!