Carbon footprint
A carbon footprint is the total greenhouse-gas emissions attributable directly or indirectly to an activity, product, person, or system, usually expressed as carbon-dioxide equivalent.
The Art of Code
A carbon footprint is the total amount of greenhouse gases produced by an activity, product, person, or system, usually expressed as carbon-dioxide equivalent.
- How it is used
- Frames software resource consumption as an environmental and operational impact to reduce through green design.
- How deep it goes
- Defines the metric, separates operational and embodied emissions, and explains SCI-based estimation limits without exact code-level calculation.
- Examples
- Uses smartphones, servers, web-page analyzers, cloud reporting, static analysis, microbenchmarks, and profilers as concrete measurement contexts.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via carbon calculators, cloud reports, static analysis, benchmarks, and profilers to compare and reduce resource-intensive software choices.
Introduction to Generative AI, Second Edition
A carbon footprint is the total greenhouse-gas emissions attributable to an activity, process, product, or system, commonly expressed as carbon-dioxide equivalent.
- How it is used
- Uses carbon footprint to assess the environmental costs of developing and using large language models.
- How deep it goes
- Explains accounting boundaries and sources of uncertainty through estimates, without specifying a standardized calculation method.
- Examples
- Compares a GPT-3 training estimate with per-person annual emissions and uses BLOOM to illustrate broader accounting.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate/understand LLM footprint claims by checking which activities and infrastructure an estimate includes.
Read how Introduction to Generative AI, Second Edition explains carbon footprint →
Related concepts
- green coding patternaddressed by · A green coding pattern is a reusable software design or implementation practice that reduces resource consumption and environmental impact.
- environmental impactmeasured by · Environmental impact is the effect of an activity, product, technology, or system on the natural environment, including effects from resource use, emissions, and waste.
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