Climate change concerns emphasize the need for sustainable computing. Modeling the carbon footprint (CFP), including operational and embodied CFP from semiconductor use, manufacture and design, is essential. Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) stand out as promising platforms due to their reconfigurability across various applications, enabling the amortization of embodied CFP across multiple applications. This paper introduces GreenFPGA, a tool estimating the total CFP of FPGAs over their lifespan, considering uncertainties in CFP modeling. It accounts for CFP during design, manufacturing, reconfigurability (reuse), operation, disposal, testing, and recycling. GreenFPGA identifies deployment regimes in which FPGAs can be more sustainable than ASICs, GPUs, and CPUs under the modeled iso-performance assumptions. Experimental results highlight the importance of analyzing applications across different computing platforms to assess their CFP while varying parameters such as application type, lifetime, usage time, and volume impact their total CFP. Across the evaluated pairwise iso-performance case studies with ASICs, GPUs, and CPUs, FPGAs can be more sustainable under specific deployment regimes involving frequently changing, diverse workloads and low-volume applications.

翻译：气候变化的关注强调了可持续计算的需求。对碳足迹（CFP）进行建模（包括半导体使用、制造和设计过程中的运营碳足迹和隐含碳足迹）至关重要。现场可编程门阵列（FPGA）因其跨多种应用的可重构性而脱颖而出，这使得隐含碳足迹可以在多个应用中摊销。本文介绍了GreenFPGA，一种估算FPGA在其生命周期内总碳足迹的工具，同时考虑了碳足迹建模中的不确定性。它涵盖了设计、制造、可重构性（复用）、运行、废弃、测试及回收等环节的碳足迹。GreenFPGA识别了在模拟的等性能假设下，FPGA在可持续性方面优于ASIC、GPU和CPU的部署场景。实验结果强调了跨不同计算平台分析应用以评估其碳足迹的重要性，同时应用类型、生命周期、使用时间和产量等参数的变化会影响其总碳足迹。在与ASIC、GPU和CPU的成对等性能案例研究中，FPGA在涉及频繁变化、多样化工作负载及低产量应用的特定部署场景下更具可持续性。