Papers for

environmental policy makers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

LLM serving decisions shaped by multiple sustainability impacts

Beyond Energy: When Sustainability Dimensions Reshape LLM Serving Decisions

Abstract: Large language model (LLM) serving has environmental impacts across energy consumption, carbon emission, water consumption, and biodiversity loss. Yet these dimensions are largely evaluated in isolation, leaving it unclear when and how they lead to different optimization decisions. We present PRISM, a unified framework for characterizing and optimizing LLM serving across energy, carbon, water, and biodiversity impacts. Our analysis reveals a fundamental distinction: computing configurations determine energy consumption, whereas where and when LLM serving is deployed determine its carbon, water, and biodiversity impacts. Under a fixed deployment choice and operational-only accounting, all dimensions preserve the same energy-based configuration ranking. Deployment rankings can diverge across dimensions, while embodied impacts can break configuration invariance when they exceed a lifecycle crossover boundary. PRISM identifies these conditions, quantifies cross-dimensional regrets, and balances the four dimensions. In regional-routing experiments, PRISM reduces median worst-case regret by 50.2% relative to the strongest baseline.

Mon 28 SeptComputers and SocietyDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster ComputingMachine Learning
The gist
Running large language models (LLMs) impacts the environment in many ways like energy use, carbon emissions, water use, and harming biodiversity. The authors show that how much energy a computer setup uses is separate from where and when the LLM is run, which affects carbon and water impacts differently. They created PRISM, a framework that considers all these factors together to help pick better ways to serve LLMs that balance these impacts. Their tests show PRISM can significantly reduce mistakes people make when choosing setups based on just one impact type.
Open → 2609.35569v1