Minisymposium Presentation

The Worldwide LHC computing Grid has been developed over the last two decades to include more than 160 sites in over 40 countries. This infrastructure grew out of technical, financial, and political considerations, and is a remarkable achievement. However, it was also created before the necessity to consider the environmental impact of computing infrastructures, became an imperative. Great efforts are now being made to reduce the carbon footprint of the WLCG computing and respond strongly to this agenda. In the future, many more scientific projects will need large-scale computing infrastructures to tackle increasingly large data sets. Whilst these endeavours may be able to build on the technical success of WLCG they also have the opportunity to build-in, and optimise, environmental considerations from the start. In this talk, I will give an overview of the work that is going on within WLCG to “green the Grid” and consider what aspects might be done differently if we had the opportunity to start again.