We do not over-engineer. A client does not always need high levels of redundancy or incredibly accurate simulations.
Interview with Sophie Proust, Chief Technology Officer and Public Affairs at Atos.
How does Atos’s work in R&D and innovation support decarbonization?
Our innovations are contributing to decarbonization in three main ways. Firstly, the technology that we design and develop is more energy efficient. Secondly, our assets help decarbonize the business processes of our clients. For example, we are using edge computing in our solutions in shop floors and production lines. That reduces the requirement to send data to the cloud and in this way lessens the power consumption of our clients. Thirdly, we ensure that we provide our clients with the best computing architecture for their energy consumption. We do not over-engineer. A client does not always need high levels of redundancy or incredibly accurate simulations. Our solutions, tailored for our clients, are effective, intelligent and energy efficient.
How can green software development help accelerate decarbonization?
We have implemented strict design rules and guidelines for improving energy efficiency that our developers follow when writing code or developing applications. We have rules that reduce the power consumption of a program when it is in idle mode, for example, and specific rules for Java applications. Our rules are not static and our guidelines are constantly evolving. The Atos community of developers is inquisitive, keen to share discoveries and best practices and we are learning all the time.
“At all stages of the design cycle, we look for ways to reduce the energy consumption of our solutions and to minimize the carbon footprint of our clients.”
How are cloud and edge computing helping to reduce carbon footprints?
Cloud computing consumes less energy than proprietary infrastructure and in-house data centers. In a cloud environment, clients pay per use and the infrastructure adapts automatically to the load. The applications that run on the cloud are also more energy efficient since, when they migrate to cloud, monolithic legacy applications are split into micro services that consume less energy. We are experts at helping our clients make their applications more energy efficient when they move to cloud.
We use our extremely energy-efficient edge computing solutions when there is less need to transfer data to the cloud, for example when our clients need low latency and real-time computations, such as those enabling autonomous driving services.
What is Atos doing to improve energy efficiency in High-Performance Computing?
We have over 20 years’ experience in HPC. The systems that we make today are not just more powerful. They are also more scalable, flexible and energy efficient.
Our HPC clients are focused on power consumption as well as on performance and their demand for lower emissions is driving innovation in supercomputing. We now use warm water, for example, to cool hardware components and minimize power consumption. We want computation to be effective and energy efficient at all times and we work with clients at the software level to prioritize and balance loads across clusters. We can terminate a simulation early if it is going in the wrong direction and we can also use AI to enable predictive maintenance in our supercomputers and reduce outages.
We are preparing for quantum computing in an HPC environment. It will have good potential to solve more complex problems in the fight against climate change and will do so more energy efficiently than classical computing. One of our clients is already using our quantum accelerator to search for molecules that can absorb carbon from the atmosphere.
How can digital help drive decarbonization?
Decarbonization is a key focus for innovation at Atos and our Expert Community includes an interest group dedicated to developing use cases for decarbonization. Our Scientific Community is very active in the thought leadership area, exploring the wider impact of decarbonization on business and society.
At Atos we do not just show how new technologies work. We demonstrate the benefits of decarbonization and explain the key use cases. We measure energy consumption and we monitor emissions. We work with our clients to understand the carbon cost of their processes. We help them choose the right technologies to reduce their carbon footprints. Wherever we operate, our digital innovations are helping make decarbonization a reality.
