Cloud-native computing and green open source software boast the great potential to lower organizations' environmental impacts. The next step on this path is integrating carbon emissions and other sustainability data within dashboards and metrics traditionally used to measure and optimize cloud costs, Arun Gupta, Intel VP and GM of open ecosystems, explained in an email to SDxCentral.

"Once companies have invested in enabling CO2 data the same way they have enabled budget and cost data in their operations, they will want to have confidence that they can hit those targets," Gupta said. This is where the green software principles come into play; its techniques at scale via open source can provide that confidence.

"For example, if you have a scheduled workload that has scheduling flexibility, you can take advantage of the Green Software Foundation’s carbon-aware API to help schedule that workload in the time or place with lower CO2 per kWHr [kilowatt hour], also known as carbon intensity, to enable those reductions without significant changes to your application logic," he explained.

As green software capabilities become increasingly embedded in enterprise operations, "the impact will grow," Gupta said.

The chipmaker's open ecosystem is built around the idea that open innovation, open platforms, and horizontal competition offer choice and create trust while allowing innovation to thrive, Gupta said.

Intel has optimized open source code and drivers in a number of communities for decades in efforts to "ensure applications run in the most optimal and efficient manner," he said. The company also invests its time, expertise, and engineers in "a myriad of critical open projects and foundations." This approach aims to reduce complexity and increase productivity, portability, and performance so developers can focus on innovating, Gupta explained.

Intel engineers represent the largest group of corporate contributors to the Linux kernel, contribute to hundreds of other open source projects, and release tools designed at Intel to the broader open source community. "Initiatives such as these also inform our continuous learning and help us meet evolving needs across industries," Gupta said.

As global compute demand, needs, and resources continue to rise, Intel aims to steer toward what Gupta described as "a new frontier of collaboration, combining our unique strengths in hardware with a commitment to a strong, open software ecosystem." To that point, the company plans to focus on software that optimizes CPUs, GPUs, IPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs "so every application will run better, faster, and more securely on Intel," he said.

Intel's work with sustainability-focused open source projects has the potential to help Intel lower its own environmental footprint, Gupta added. The projects Intel currently contributes to, including Kubernetes Power Manager and Telemetry Aware Scheduling mainly focus on optimizing CPU energy use by matching workloads with the most appropriate CPU power management capabilities.

Since Intel's largest source of emissions falls under scope 3 downstream emissions from its products' energy usage, projects that optimize and increase carbon efficiency should help lower that scope 3 figure "as we work to make our customers’ workloads more efficient," Gupta added. "It's going to take a lot of significant work, and that’s where we believe capturing the scale of open source is important."

He also spotlighted the chipmaker's recent induction into the Green Software Foundation, which will ensure Intel is working alongside the industry to focus efforts where they'll cause the greatest impacts. Intel is working to adopting open standards, including one around software carbon intensity, and exploring best practices to adopt "the right" sustainable software principles for high-priority open source projects.

Many of the sustainability-focused open source projects Intel is involved with are either sponsored or supported by Intel but published as open source "in the spirit of open source collaboration," Gupta noted. "As the area of open source sustainability matures, we are looking for ways to align some of these projects with larger open source efforts such as the CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation] sustainability TAG [technical advisory group] which has just been formed," he added.