The National Science Foundation CISE Core Programs (NSF 21-616) has issued a new Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) on Design for Sustainability in Computing (DSC) (NSF 22-060). The purpose of DSC is to encourage the submission of novel and high impact proposals that advance sustainability in all aspects of computing broadly, as scoped within the CISE Core programs. DSC seeks proposals that look well beyond power/energy efficiency. Design for sustainable computing approaches with carbon and other sustainability metrics as first order optimization criteria are a particular goal of this DCL. For example, DSC encourages a full lifecycle analysis approach that considers computing across its lifecycle including embodied costs from manufacturing, impacts from supply chains, reuse, recycling, and disposal, all of which go beyond the supply chain. DSC is open to diverse notions of sustainability presuming they can be quantified and will provide impact. DSC is not soliciting proposals that solely seek to advance energy efficiency, performance, or other traditional computing metrics or develop computing to support sustainability in other domains. It is specifically focused on design for sustainable computing.
