Digital Research Infrastructures (RIs) like data centers are foundational to modern, data-driven science, but their environmental impact has become a critical design and operational constraint. To address this, the Elsevier Computer Communications Journal has announced a upcoming Special Issue focused on creating reusable methods, metrics, architectures, and practices to reduce energy consumption and environmental footprints across RI lifecycles.
This Special Issue aims to bridge traditionally siloed communities—including networking, distributed systems, e-infrastructures, and sustainability—to accelerate the transfer of reproducible, evidence-based approaches into operational RIs.
Topics of Interest
The topics of interest (but are not limited to) include:
- Energy and carbon accounting for distributed RIs: measurement, attribution, and uncertainty quantification across sites and services.
- Sustainability KPIs and operational dashboards for the cloud continuum (compute, storage, network, accelerators).
- Lifecycle-aware design and operation: procurement, embodied carbon, circularity, and end-of-life strategies for RI components.
- Energy-aware resource management and orchestration: placement, scaling, admission control, and SLA trade-offs for edge-to-cloud services.
- Sustainable networking for RIs: telemetry-driven optimisation, energy-aware routing, and green network function deployment.
- Workload-aware power management for heterogeneous resources (CPU/GPU/DPU/SmartNIC), including profiling, scheduling, and consolidation.
- Sustainable data pipelines and scientific workflows: data locality, caching, replication, and workflow optimisation under energy constraints.
- Green experimentation and reproducibility in testbeds: experiment design, power instrumentation, and FAIR/FACT-aligned sharing of results.
- Operational case studies from large-scale RIs, federations, and experimental testbeds (methodologies, lessons learned, and open artefacts).
Policy, governance, and standardisation: compliance, reporting, and incentives for sustainable RI operation.
Guest Editors
Dr. Raffaele R. Bruno (Institute for Informatics and Telematics National Research Council, Italy)
Dr. Kostas Chounos (University of Thessaly, Greece)
Dr. Shashikant Ilager (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Submission Information
The submission platform (Editorial Manager®) opens on June 6th, 2026. Authors must select the article type “VSI: Sustainable Digital Research Infrastructures” when submitting. Please ensure your manuscript’s impact is clearly demonstrated within the context of sustainability, as out-of-scope papers will face immediate rejection.
Important Dates
Submission Opens: June 6, 2026
Submission Deadline: August 30, 2026
First Revision Notification: October 15, 2026
For submission guidelines, please visit the Elsevier Computer Communications Journal Homepage.