Carbon Aware Computing with Kendal Smith and Chris Talbott

This week on the podcast, Stephanie Wong and Alexandrina Garcia-Verdin are diving into an important topic for our global community: sustainability and carbon aware computing. Kendal Smith, program manager for Carbon Intelligent Computing, and Chris Talbott, leader of the sustainability product marketing efforts at Google Cloud, start the show telling us why sustainability is so important in the tech world.

Environmentally conscious data centers are an important part of Google Cloud sustainability efforts. Using computing in the smartest way possible, Kendall tells us, is the root of green computing. Wind, solar, and other low or carbon-free energy sources are employed at Google Cloud data centers to accomplish this goal. Kendall and Chris detail the green goals Google has met or exceeded, including carbon neutrality in 2007, and future goals for Google.

Chris explains how Google Cloud customers have taken advantage of Google’s sustainability practices and been inspired in their own businesses. Kendall details the Carbon Intelligent Computing Platform and how they adjust compute times to align with available carbon-free energy. We hear about Google’s sustainability metrics, including the Carbon Free Energy Percentage, and how these measurements can help Google and its customers run environmentally friendly applications. Chris describes the process he and his team go through when helping Google clients design their carbon aware strategy.

To wrap up the show, our guests talk about the future of de-carbonized computing at Google.

Kendal Smith

Kendal is the Program Manager for Carbon Intelligent Computing at Google, which reduces the carbon footprint of Data Centers by exploiting flexibility in compute workloads. She also helps Google engineers build products efficiently, as well as advise other Bets on carbon measurement and tracking.

Chris Talbott

Chris leads sustainability product marketing and customer engagement efforts for Google Cloud, and works on opening new Google Cloud data centers throughout the globe. He helps customers improve the environmental impact of their IT operations and identify new opportunities to tackle climate change challenges with cloud technology.

Cool things of the week

• Active Assist’s new feature, predictive autoscaling, helps improve response times for your applications site
• Maximizing developer productivity video

Interview

• Google Carbon Aware Computing Workshop 2021 site
• Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows blog
• How carbon-free is your cloud? New data lets you know blog
• Google Cloud Region Picker site

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Alexandrina is working on a new series called People & Planet AI. The first episode, Recovering global wildlife populations using ML is out now. She’s also been working on internal websites to share climate information.

Stephanie has been working on a blog post about AppSheet Automation, which we talked about in-depth last week on the podcast.