The 1st International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing (LOCO 2024) will bring together researchers and practitioners with a keen interest in low carbon and sustainable computing. The workshop will provide a forum for sharing new ideas, for presenting ongoing work and early results, as well as for bringing forward well-founded criticism.

LOCO 2024 is an initiative of the Scottish Programming Languages Institute (SPLI), supported by the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA), and was inspired by the Programming for the Planet (PROPL) workshop.

The workshop is either on line or in person both for speakers and attendees. You can deliver your talk either on line or in person.

The workshop will be held on 3 December 2024 at the Advanced Research Centre of the University of Glasgow. The room is designed for hybrid events and well-ventilated. The building entire building has state-of-the-art accessibility provisions and is well-ventilated.

We want to make LOCO an inclusive and welcoming event. Please get in touch if we can do anything to make participation easier for you.

To ensure wide and flexible access, we plan to record all workshop sessions and make the video recordings available on this website after the workshop has taken place.

All participants are expected to adhere to the LOCO Code of Conduct.

The carbon footprint of ICT is rising despite the urgent need to decarbonise society and to stay within planetary tolerance levels. The operational and embodied carbon emissions from ICT are estimated to already contribute 2 to 3 percent of the global emissions – very much rivalling aviation – and ICT’s footprint is expected to rise further over the next decades. This development is due to major computing trends such as AI/ML, Big Data, and the Internet of Things, and this growth in emissions from computing is unsustainable.

The LOCO workshop aims to provide a forum for ideas, work, and criticism that aims to reduce the emissions from computing. We invite researchers and practitioners across research areas and application domains to take part and contribute to our workshop.

The main focus of the workshop is on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from computing. However, computing science research and practice that helps to reduce other emissions or to mitigate the effects of climate change in another way is also in scope.

We welcome submissions that describe new ideas and visions, just as much as reports describing ongoing work, completed projects, and practical tools. In addition, we also welcome work that uncovers and criticises significant problems with established ways and emerging trends.

• Measurements, testbeds, and simulation
  • carbon footprint estimation methodologies for compute resources and software systems
  • testbeds for sustainable and low carbon computing methods (e.g. co-simulation of computing and energy systems, hybrid testbeds, emulation)
• Sustainable software engineering
  • practices and tools for low carbon and sustainable software engineering
• Energy efficiency
  • energy-efficient programming languages and compilers (e.g. resource-aware type systems, low-overhead language implementations, energy-efficient compilation to heterogeneous systems)
  • energy-efficiency of applications, e.g. green AI/ML, big data analytics, search
• Hardware efficiency
  • cloud computing and virtualisation techniques to efficiently share compute resources
  • edge computing and other locality-aware approaches to reduce resource usage, energy consumption, and carbon emissions
  • load balancing, resource allocation, scheduling and placement, as well as other compute resource management mechanisms to improve resource usage
• Carbon awareness
  • carbon-aware and grid-aware load migration, time shifting, and scaling mechanisms
  • energy-efficient and carbon-aware networking
  • carbon-aware data centre design and operation
• Embodied carbon and circular economy
  • methods for extending the useful life of compute resources (e.g. reliable monitoring and early-warning systems for long-living hardware)
  • low-carbon and sustainable data storage and caching
  • circular economy: compute resource reuse and recycling
• Frugal computing
  • frugality/sufficiency, demand reduction, degrowth computing
  • human-computer interaction that encourages considerate use of ultimately limited computing resources
  • sociological and economical aspects of low-carbon computing, e.g. end-user behaviour, business models
• Computing for climate science, other scientific computing, and energy informatics
  • effective programming and efficient execution of software for climate science
  • sustainable scientific computing and workflow management
  • methods and tools for forecasting weather and energy availability

Normal talks: extended abstract with optional post-workshop full paper

We follow a post-proceeding model: Authors initially submit an extended abstract of up to 2 pages, plus references. Authors of accepted extended abstracts will be expected to present at the workshop and will afterwards be invited to submit full workshop papers of up to 8 pages, plus references. Full workshop paper submissions will be reviewed again and, where possible, we will assign the same reviewers as for the extended abstracts. Where authors of accepted extended abstracts choose not to submit a full workshop paper, we will include the extended abstracts in our post-proceedings.

Lightning talks: short abstracts

In addition to the normal talks, there will be a lightning talk session with talks of no more than five minutes — back to back. Authors submit a short abstract of no more than 1 page (plus references). These will be reviewed separately from the extended abstracts, and the review criteria are more relaxed.

Submission info and and template

All papers should be original work by the authors and use the ACM sigconf double-column format or a similar format, more details here.

If you use the ACM template, please remove the ACM copyright information and CCS concepts. You can find useful instructions on how to remove the ACM branding from the sample-sigconf.tex source code on the website of the LIMITs workshops.

All papers will be made freely available on our website. The copyright will remain with the authors. However, we are encouraging workshop paper authors to include a CC license statement in their paper. If authors submit their paper on arXiv, they will be included in the arXiv-based Proceedings.

Submissions should be made via EasyChair.

Review process and criteria

Reviewing will be non-blind: Authors should include their names, affiliations, and contact information, and reviews will include reviewer names. Each paper will be reviewed by several members of the PC and reviews will be handled via EasyChair. The review criteria are:

• novelty
• rigour
• significance and fit to the topic

Program Committee

• Noman Bashir, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Ivona Brandić, Vienna University of Technology
• Matthew Chalmers, University of Glasgow
• Ruzanna Chitchyan, University of Bristol
• Neil Chue Hong, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre
• Tim Cowlishaw
• Istvan David, McMaster University
• Pierre-Alain Fayolle, The University of Aizu
• Adrian Friday, Lancaster University
• Levin Fritz
• Bruno García A. da V., Universidad de Chile
• Saeid Ghafouri, Queen’s University Belfast
• Timo Hönig, Ruhr University Bochum
• Brendan Howell, Independent Artist & Reluctant Engineer
• Anish Jindal, Durham University
• Loïc Lannelongue, University of Cambridge
• Ulf Leser, Humboldt University of Berlin
• Clarissa Littler, Portland Community College
• Hans-Wolfgang Loidl, Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh
• Anil Madhavapeddy, University of Cambridge
• Lionel Morel, Université de Lyon
• Dominic Orchard, University of Kent
• Daniel Schien, University of Bristol
• Mike Sheldon, AgAnalyst Ltd
• Demetris Trihinas, University of Nicosia
• Andrew Turner, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre
• Amjad Ullah, Edinburgh Napier University
• Blesson Varghese, University of St Andrews
• Ismael Velasco, Adora Foundation
• Monica Vitali, Politecnico di Milano
• Michele Weiland, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre
• Kelly Widdicks, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
• Philipp Wiesner, Technische Universität Berlin
• Noa Zilberman, University of Oxford