Chris Broekema (ASTRON)
Context and introduction
Data-intensive natural sciences collect vast amounts of data and process these using general purpose computing and dedicated software. The result is a scientifically useful data product. Such areas of science, for instance radio astronomy, require large amounts of computational resources to produce science results. While the energy cost of these will not be at the same scale as a generic cloud-provider data center, it is still clear that in the current climate crisis we cannot continue to consume resources without limit.
We recently did a small-scale study where we asked various scientists in a data-intensive science, radio astronomy, about their perceived role in reducing the impact of their work on the environment. The results were interesting enough to warrant a follow-up study in which we broaden the scope of the population.
Goals and tools in this project
This project will consist of two parts, en we envision this to be done by two MSc students in close collaboration. The students will develop the research together, but will apply the developed project onto two different populations. The previous work questioned staff-astronomers at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) their impact on the environment, and how they thought they could have impact on this. In this follow-up study we will expand the scope of the research and expand the questioned population to encompass
- Astronomy staff at universities, both tenured and PhD/Postdoc level
- Research software engineers working on codes used in radio astronomy, at ASTRON, at the Netherlands eScience centre and at the various universities. We may also include software engineers from commercial companies that are hired to do work in data-intensive science, or are doing partially funded work through grants in collaboration with research institutes like ASTRON.
The research questions are similar to the previous project: how sensitive are the end-users of our instrument, the astronomers, and the programmers that are writing the code used by those end-users to incentives to reduce the environmental footprint of their science and/or code. This will involve a number of interviews or focus group sessions with a representative set of the populations described above. Key research questions in this process are
- How aware are you currently to the environmental impact that your research or code has?
- Are you currently taking any action to limit the impact of your research or code?
- What kind of mechanism would give you sufficient incentive to take environmental impact into account?
- If we end op needing to introduce some form of quotum, either in processing capacity, energy consumption, or any other measure, how can we ensure this is as fair as possible?
Deliverables
We expect this project would be a good fit for a pair of MSc students working on their MSc thesis, Each student would focus on one of the two populations described above, but the students are encouraged to develop the script for the interviews together to make sure fair comparison between the two. Interviews, analysis and thesis are expected to be done individually. A successful project will result in
- a reviewed list of questions or a interview script and a number of scenario's to be discussed with the populations
- a set of organized meetings with invited practitioners, at the various institutes mentioned, with raw notes, transcripts or recordings (appropriately secured to be GDPR compliant)
- an analysis of the discussed topics, with high level recommendations on specific incentives