Measuring the Effectiveness of Carbon-Aware AI Training Strategies in Cloud Instances: A Confirmation Study

Abstract

While the massive adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is threatening the environment, new research efforts begin to be employed to measure and mitigate the carbon footprint of both training and inference phases. In this domain, two carbon-aware training strategies have been proposed in the literature: Flexible Start and Pause & Resume. Such strategies—natively Cloud-based—use the time resource to postpone or pause the training algorithm when the carbon intensity reaches a threshold. While such strategies have proved to achieve interesting results on a benchmark of modern models covering Natural Language Processing (NLP) and computer vision applications and a wide range of model sizes (up to 6.1B parameters), it is still unclear whether such results may hold also with different algorithms and in different geographical regions. In this confirmation study, we use the same methodology as the state-of-the-art strategies to recompute the saving in carbon emissions of Flexible Start and Pause & Resume in the Anomaly Detection (AD) domain. Results confirm their effectiveness in two specific conditions, but the percentage reduction behaves differently compared with what is stated in the existing literature.

Keywords

• green AI
• green software
• cloud
• sustainability
• carbon awareness