Re: [recipe] FYI: [admin-discuss] REMINDER: IETF carbon emission measurement workshops on 20 and 21 September

[Michael Welzl <[e-mail]>]

Sent from my iPhone

> On 24 Sep 2022, at 19:17, Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Sep 24, 2022 at 04:43:23PM +0200, Michael Welzl wrote:
> 
> [Carbon offsetting]
> 
>> Sure, such things is a useful thing to discuss - but still, to me, it may only be a drop in the bucket compared to the potential that the IETF has when it comes to reducing energy for the Internet.
> 
> Of course, looking at (1) carbon emissions of IETF meetings and maybe how to offset them and
> (2) technology to reduce carbon emissions of Interneet technology start out as two completely
> separate tracks now, but i find it quite hard to work on the second without starting
> to have an opinion about the first. Especially when there is myths, pandering or sillyness
> in the first.
> 
>> Whether the Internet truly makes up half, 1/4, even 1/10 of the aviation industry’s GHG emissions… just imagine the potential impact if we manage to even only reduce its energy by a small amount, but at a global scale!
> 
> Right. So when it comes to carbon offsetting of IETF meetings, instead of financing some
> shady organizations that promise offsetting our travel emissions through 
> "more trees in africa", instead we could account some of the reduction in the carbon
> emissions in the Internet through our hopeful future work as our offset strategy.
> 
>> I think we shouldn’t focus on trade-offs too much. There are ways to reduce energy that do not embed a trade-off, and in some cases it can even be a win-win (shorter FCT = more sleep time for devices).
> 
> I know where you are coming from and i like that direction/work a lot as well, but i would
> caution, that the benefits of it depend higly on the energy efficiency curve of compute/networking
> equipment. All the "bulk" solutions will loose value if that curve would turn linear.

True, but that’s a bit of a stretch?


> So my
> primary question is: are there any "natural" limits in linearizing this curve ? Then as a pessimist,
> i would love to design / evaluate against those limits instead of against the inferior hardware we have
> today. Especially because i only need to look at mobile device HW/CPU to see that there is a
> lot of room for improvement (AFAIK).

I guess this is about evaluating the cost of sleep/awake transitioning over the years…  how has this evolved, will it become miniscule?

Cheers, Michael

> 
> Cheers
>    Toerless
> 
>> Cedric:
>> 
>>>> On Sep 22, 2022, at 11:53 PM, Cedric Westphal <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>> 
>>> HI Michael & Toerless:
>>> 
>>> Michael: thank you very much for the data points.
>>> 
>>> Regarding your paper: I really like the idea that protocols can help saving energies. When we wrote our draft https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-cx-green-ps/ <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-cx-green-ps/> we were a bit disappointed that the protocol side of things didn’t have great opportunities for reducing energy consumption – aside of course of facilitating sleep modes as you suggest in your paper. If you have a chance to read it, we would welcome your comments. I’m currently updating it for London.
>> 
>> I did read the draft, but didn’t have any comments. I did find it interesting though!  I’ll be in London too, btw, and I’ll give a brief presentation on the relationship between energy saving and congestion control (just the simple result from my paper) to ICCRG there. I think there are plenty of opportunities in protocols - they just need to be worked out, evaluated, …   I mean, you point out some interesting opportunities in your own draft.
>> 
>> 
>>> Your paper seem to argue that short/high bandwidth transmissions are better than longer/slower ones – we wrote something like this in our paperhttps://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&citation_for_view=5WcgOxMAAAAJ:rJyh6hJnyfgC <https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&citation_for_view=5WcgOxMAAAAJ:rJyh6hJnyfgC> (upon which the draft is based on) and we got some pushback to the extent that: short/fast = burstiness = high buffers = packet loss = re-transmissions.
>> 
>> Thanks, i’ll read this.
>> Regarding bursts, I think we shouldn’t think about “bursts” and even use a different word. Bulk? “Send data in bulk” as opposed to "sending a burst”?
>> 
>> This is an important distinction because data in bulk can (and probably should) still be paced - we really shouldn’t be sending bursts if we can avoid them. What I mean is something like sending 100 paced packets in 1 RTT instead of 10 packets per RTT over 10 RTTs.  In fact, the Internet does the latter kind of transmission often enough. Given typical flow lengths and growing capacities, the primary role of congestion control in today’s Internet seems to be to waste our time with round-trips (before transmissions are over).   Some hints about this:  https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9817041 <https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9817041>  (or: http://arxiv.org/abs/2206.06642 <http://arxiv.org/abs/2206.06642> ) … and references therein, e.g. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3472305.3472321
>> 
>> 
>>> I checked the spreadsheet on the other paper – they haven’t been updated.
>> 
>> I did the same!  Disappointing, isn’t it.
>> 
>> 
>>> It’s a strange paper, that makes a lot of assumption regarding energy consumption, but you have to start somewhere. I’m surprised you’re saying there hasn’t been follow up to that, it’s such an important topic.
>> 
>> I don’t think I said that? There are plenty of studies out there, but … it’s a jungle.
>> 
>> 
>>> I definitely will add some paragraph or section on “emergy” in the next version of the draft.
>>> 
>>> This paper evaluates the emissions from virtual conferences – to keep in mind when comparing with IETF emissions from combined hybrid/in-person conference:https://forum.legacy-events.com/uploads/short-url/zmI7aFu6X6ojBESqz9IWKke4GW4.pdf <https://forum.legacy-events.com/uploads/short-url/zmI7aFu6X6ojBESqz9IWKke4GW4.pdf>
>>> This paper assesses the value of in-person vs virtual to be 66 times higher from the travel alone (but that’s 99% of the in-person energy cost!)
>> 
>> Thanks!
>> 
>>> 
>>> Toerless: was that paper cited at the workshop???
>>> 
>>> Best,
>>> 
>>> C. 
>> 
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Michael
>> 
> 
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