Reducing the climate impact of data portals: a case study
Noah Gießing, Madhurima Deb, Ankit Satpute, Moritz Schubotz, Olaf Teschke
TL;DR
The paper addresses the urgent need to reduce the climate impact of ICT by focusing on energy efficiency in information retrieval Infrastructure, using the MaRDI Portal as a case study. It surveys and organizes a set of green-coding techniques—profiling, caching, search-engine choice, container and CDN optimizations, minification, compression, database tuning, data-sparing strategies, lazy loading, extension and server adjustments, and hardware considerations—and outlines a plan to implement these measures and quantify their energy savings. Its main contribution is a structured methodology and actionable roadmap that can be applied to MaRDI and other knowledge bases, offering a model for assessing and reducing environmental footprint in IR portals. The work demonstrates that energy efficiency can coincide with improved latency and reliability, providing practical guidance for researchers and developers in the IR community to mitigate climate impact while maintaining service quality.
Abstract
The carbon footprint share of the information and communication technology (ICT) sector has steadily increased in the past decade and is predicted to make up as much as 23 \% of global emissions in 2030. This shows a pressing need for developers, including the information retrieval community, to make their code more energy-efficient. In this project proposal, we discuss techniques to reduce the energy footprint of the MaRDI (Mathematical Research Data Initiative) Portal, a MediaWiki-based knowledge base. In future work, we plan to implement these changes and provide concrete measurements on the gain in energy efficiency. Researchers developing similar knowledge bases can adapt our measures to reduce their environmental footprint. In this way, we are working on mitigating the climate impact of Information Retrieval research.