Speaker
Description
ENSURE (ENvironmentally SUstainable digital services and practices for REsearch infrastructures) is a 36-month Horizon Europe TECH-01-01 project, started in September 2026, addressing the growing environmental footprint of large-scale digital Research Infrastructures (RIs). As RIs generate, process and store ever-increasing volumes of data, energy and water consumption, carbon emissions and e-waste rise in tandem. ENSURE operationalises a "4M cycle" (Measure, Model, Monitor, Moderate) to embed environmental sustainability into the daily operation of digital RIs without compromising scientific excellence. The project combines harmonised environmental metrics, reference datasets and benchmarks, digital twins of data centres, GenAI-based predictive modelling, sustainability-aware workload management, and a certification and reporting framework aligned with EU legislation (CSRD/ESRS, EED, ESPR) and international standards. The consortium unites major ESFRI Landmarks (HL-LHC, SKA, European XFEL), the pan-European digital infrastructure provider EGI, life-science communities (WeNMR, VIP), research-and-technology data centres, universities, and sustainability and certification experts, ensuring both technical excellence and broad uptake across the European RI landscape.
CESGA (Galicia Supercomputing Centre, Spain) contributes as a technology- and research-focused data-centre partner. It takes part in developing and refining the Environmental Impact Management Framework, helping integrate life-cycle-assessment datasets and offering computational facilities to host digital-twin instances for external RIs. As a water-cooled data centre, CESGA works alongside STFC and TUBITAK to validate methods linking operational energy and water usage to workload execution, and it contributes to metrics-reporting tasks, deploying the AUDITOR accounting client to feed real operational data into ENSURE's accounting-metrics infrastructure. CESGA's FinisTerrae-III system, and from 2026 its next-generation FinisTerrae-IV platform, serve as validation environments, while its support for the ANERIS marine-science community offers a real scientific use case for testing sustainability tooling at scale.
These roles build directly on CESGA's own experience managing environmental sustainability in its data-centre operations. CESGA's facility is ISO 50001-certified, operating under a dedicated energy-efficiency policy with continuous monitoring of Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE): average PUE improved from 1.71 in 2011 to 1.49 in 2021, achieved through optimised cooling infrastructure sized to a facility load exceeding 300 kW. A new datacentre under construction, which will host FinisTerrae-IV, has been designed with energy efficiency and sustainability as core requirements.
This presentation introduces ENSURE's objectives and technical approach, details CESGA's contribution to the project's data-centre and metrics work packages, and shares CESGA's practical experience operating a sustainable HPC facility, illustrating how research infrastructures across Europe can measure, model, monitor and moderate their environmental impact while sustaining scientific excellence.