A project with scripts to methodically calculate the Carbon Footprint of Workflow Executions from Nextflow trace files.
For the current version, replicating the previous calculation approach noted in the Credits section, example usage has been provided with default values:
$ python -m src.scripts.IchnosCF <trace-name> <ci-value|ci-file-name> <power_model> <? interval=60> <? pue=1.0> <? memory-coeff=0.392>
$ python3 -m src.scripts.IchnosCF ampliseq-1 uk-marg-010125-110225 gpg_15_powersave_linear 5 1.0 0.392
Note
The trace file name must be the file name only, and traces should be csv files stored in the data trace directory!
Note
The trace file must use raw data values, e.g. duration recorded in ms, this is possible by using the trace.raw flag when executing a nextflow workflow.
The script will produce two files. If the trace file name was 'test', then 'test-trace.csv' would produce a csv file of Carbon Records with energy consumption (inc. PUE) and carbon footprint for each task in the trace file. The 'test-summary.txt' file will contain details around the provided parameters (e.g. CI, PUE) and the overall energy, memory and carbon footprint.
See the test-summary and test-trace.
Using the convertor we can create updated trace files with an updated timestamp (only altering for the same day by a number of hours and minutes at present) to show how Carbon Intensity affects the Carbon Footprint over a day (or some given period in the future).
See example output:
westkath@misool:~/code/carbon-footprint$ python3 -m src.scripts.Convertor nf-rangeland-21-1.txt - 6 0 \;
westkath@misool:~/code/carbon-footprint$ python3 -m src.scripts.Convertor nf-rangeland-21-1.txt + 6 0 \;
If you use Ichnos in your research, please cite our paper:
Kathleen West, Magnus Reid, Yehia Elkhatib and Lauritz Thamsen. "Ichnos: A Carbon Footprint Estimator for Scientific Workflows" Full Workshop Paper for 1st International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing (LOCO24). 2024
Bibtex:
@misc{west2025ichnoscarbonfootprintestimator,
title={Ichnos: A Carbon Footprint Estimator for Scientific Workflows},
author={Kathleen West and Magnus Reid and Yehia Elkhatib and Lauritz Thamsen},
year={2025},
eprint={2411.12456},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.DC},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.12456},
}
Results and evaluation repository is available ichnos-results-evaluation.
- Carbon Footprint is adapted from the nf-co2footprint plugin which was based on the carbon footprint computation method developed in the Green Algorithms project.
Green Algorithms: Quantifying the Carbon Footprint of Computation. Lannelongue, L., Grealey, J., Inouye, M., Adv. Sci. 2021, 2100707. https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202100707
- Carbon Intensity makes use of the Carbon Intensity API.
- Nextflow Trace Files are generated from Nextflow workflow executions.
Nextflow enables reproducible computational workflows P. Di Tommaso, M. Chatzou, E. W. Floden, P. P. Barja, E. Palumbo, and C. Notredame, Nature Biotechnology, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 316–319, Apr. 2017, https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3820
- Carbon Footprint also features an adaptation of the calculation for variable compute energy usage from the Cloud Carbon Footprint Methodology.
- Electricity Maps (2025). 2023/4 Hourly Carbon Intensity Data (Version January 27, 2025). Electricity Maps.