When Servers Meet Species: A Fab-to-Grave Lens on Computing's Biodiversity Impact

TL;DR

This paper introduces new metrics and a modeling framework to quantify and analyze the biodiversity impact of computing systems across their lifecycle, emphasizing the importance of biodiversity in sustainable computing.

Contribution

It presents the first comprehensive framework and metrics for assessing biodiversity impact in computing, filling a significant gap in sustainability research.

Findings

Biodiversity impact is significant and often overlooked in sustainable computing.

The FABRIC framework effectively links workloads to biodiversity impacts.

Metrics like EBI and OBI enable lifecycle biodiversity assessment.

Abstract

Biodiversity loss is a critical planetary boundary, yet its connection to computing remains largely unexamined. Prior sustainability efforts in computing have focused on carbon and water, overlooking biodiversity due to the lack of appropriate metrics and modeling frameworks. This paper presents the first end-to-end analysis of biodiversity impact from computing systems. We introduce two new metrics--Embodied Biodiversity Index (EBI) and Operational Biodiversity Index (OBI)--to quantify biodiversity impact across the lifecycle, and present FABRIC, a modeling framework that links computing workloads to biodiversity impacts. Our evaluation highlights the need to consider biodiversity alongside carbon and water in sustainable computing design and optimization. The code is available at https://github.com/TianyaoShi/FABRIC.