🪨 calcium

calcium is a command wrapper tool to collect its CPU usage and report the estimated carbon footprint.

Installation

1. Download the latest binary for your architecture at the releases page.
2. Copy to the executable path, e.g., to $HOME/bin.
3. Add or make sure that the executable path is added to PATH variable:

export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin

Compiling from source

0. Install Go (https://go.dev)

1. Build calcium for Linux:

go install github.com/unkaktus/calcium/cmd/calcium@latest
export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/go/bin

Usage

Collection

Run any app transparently with a project tag:

calcium run -tag Project1337 ./analyze data.dat

It will then output to $HOME/.calcium/log.csv the following information in CSV format:

Timestamp, CPU Name, Tag, User CPU Time [s], System CPU Time [s]

For example,

2024-09-20 19:50:49,"Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8270 CPU @ 2.70GHz",Project1337,0.48,0.61

Tag value is recommended to be unique and traceable to a specific workload, such as job name or ID.

Reporting

Once your runs are done, it's time to obtain the emission footprint report.

To create a report specify the ISO 3-letter country code (ISO 3166-1 alpha-3) and run

calcium report -region DEU

The output will be in JSON format, e.g.,

{
  "Timestamp": "2024-09-22 17:45:04",
  "Software": "github.com/unkaktus/calcium",
  "Region": "DEU",
  "CarbonIntensityYear": 2023,
  "Units": {
    "CO2e": "kg",
    "CPUTime": "h",
    "Energy": "kWh"
  },
  "Tags": {
    "NSbh": {
      "CPUTime": 8249999.928888889,
      "Energy": 60156.5235436358,
      "CO2e": 22916.655917514123
    },
  }
}

Citing and sources

The required citation is for the Zenodo code record:

@software{ivan_markin_2024_13876575,
  author       = {Ivan Markin},
  title        = {calcium - Tracking carbon footprint of computing},
  month        = oct,
  year         = 2024,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  version      = {v1.4.1},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.13876575},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13876575}
}

The carbon intenity data is provided by Ember, Energy Institute, and Our World in Data.

Ember (2024); Energy Institute - Statistical Review of World Energy (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Carbon intensity of electricity generation – Ember and Energy Institute” [dataset]. Ember, “Yearly Electricity Data”; Energy Institute, “Statistical Review of World Energy” [original data]. Retrieved September 22, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity