Panel Discussion

How to Valorise sustainability in Computational Systems?

Sustainability is a term that we increasingly face everywhere: from sustainability goals to sustainability regulations and sustainability investments. Given the increasing share of computer systems in the overall societal power demand, there is clearly a need to address sustainability aspects from a CompSys perspective.

The key question that we try to address in this panel is: What are we currently doing? What can we do better / more of? What do businesses need? What does the society need? To what degree do these align?

How can we quantify / predict the possible impact of such measures? In particular when it comes to aiming for funding, one of the key challenges is to attribute concrete values to sustainability goals.

We try to bring together stakeholders from industry, political executive, and academia to share their view and discuss these matters with the CompSys community.

The key panelists will be:

• Jason Maassen (Netherlands eScience center) - Jason is Technology Lead for Efficient Computing at the NL eScience center. Jason is involved in many of the projects at the Netherlands eScience Center that apply parallel and distributed programming to scientific applications. In addition, he guides internal software development at the eScience Center and scouts for new software technology that can be used in new projects.
• Sagar Dolas (SURF) - Sagar Dolas is a program manager at SURF, where he leads and manages various programs and initiatives focused on Future Infrastructure and Applications, Advanced Computing, and Networking. In recent years, he has concentrated on energy as a design principle for the future of computing. He has led projects to integrate energy management tools with the Dutch supercomputer Snellius.
• Bernard v. Gastel (Radboud University) - Bernard van Gastel is an assistant professor in Sustainable Digitalization working at the computing science institute of the Radboud University. Besides his research in analysis methods to predict the energy consumption of software and make that info available to software developers, he researches sustainability in a broader sense. This includes the effects of software on society, such as privacy. He often works together with academics from other disciplines.
• Rachel Kuijlenburg (Logius, Dutch government IT Department) - Rachel Kuijlenburg is the sustainability coordinator at Logius. She is tasked with developing a sustainable procurement strategy for the IT products being bought by Logius, which involves creating alignment over many internal departments. Two procurements have included explicit conditions for environmental sustainability now, which will also be incorporated into new procurement contracts. Before she moved to Logius, she was a teacher at the Haagse Hogeschool and a researcher for the Mission Zero center, specializing in circulair business management.

The moderator of the panel will be Sven-Bodo Scholz (RU)