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The study reveals the carbon costs of various storage configurations in the U.K., indicating implications for future policy.
In order to achieve the higher performance year on year required by the 2030s for future LHC upgrades at a sustainable carbon cost to the environment, it is essential to start with accurate measurements of the state of play. Whilst there have been a number of studies of the carbon cost of compute for WLCG workloads published, rather less has been said on the topic of storage, both nearline and archival. We present a study of the embodied and ongoing carbon costs of storage in multiple configurations, from tape farms through to SSDs, within the U.K. Tier-1 and Tier-2s and discuss how this directs future policy.
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Packer et al. (2025) studied this question.
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