Call for Papers: Special Section on Carbon Efficient Computer Architectures and Systems

Publication: September 2025 

IEEE Transactions on Computers seeks original manuscripts for a special issue/section on Carbon Efficient Computer Architectures and Systems scheduled to appear in the September 2025 issue.

Green and sustainable computing has long been relatively synonymous with energy-efficient computing. Over the last decade there is evidence that energy and resulting carbon and other environmentally impactful emissions from Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is growing dramatically due to wide growth in cloud computing, IoT, and edge installations, globally. Additionally, during the same time period, awareness of concerns from embodied energy and carbon have emerged with the recognition that these impacts may even outstrip operational energy and carbon. Furthermore, electronic waste from disposal of electronics, exacerbated by short lifetimes of particularly mobile electronics continues to be a growing concern. Shortages of rare materials further impacts the future of electronics.

This special issue seeks impactful work on addressing the carbon problem in ICT and computing broadly. Papers that propose methods to address carbon or other environmentally impactful metrics throughout the lifecycle, particularly with consideration of the manufacturing and/or disposal phase are especially encouraged.

Papers on a range of topics are invited, including, but not limited to:

• New models and metrics for carbon-efficient or sustainable computing architectures and systems including both embodied and operational greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) including CO2
• Architectures and systems to avoid obsolescence, promote reusability, and enable longer lifetimes for saving CO2, GHGs
• Advances in edge and cloud technologies broadly to address provisioning and disaggregated computing to minimize CO2, GHGs
• Carbon efficient accelerators for computationally complex algorithms such as machine learning, blockchain, homomorphic encryption, among others
• Advances in architectures and systems leveraging emerging technologies targeting reduction of CO2, GHGs
• Techniques to advance computing within the circular economy that considers manufacturing, operation, reuse, recycling, and disposal phases of systems
• Architectures and systems that collaboratively enable sustainability in an application domain and through their ICT equipment

Submission Guidelines

Submitted papers must include new significant research-based technical contributions in the scope of the journal. Papers under review elsewhere are not acceptable for submission. Extended  versions of published conference papers (to be included as part of the submission together with a summary of differences) are welcome, but there must have at least 40% new impacting  technical/scientific material in the submitted journal version and there should be less than 30%  verbatim similarity level as reported by a tool (such as CrossRef). Guidelines concerning the  submission process and LaTeX and Word templates can be found here. While submitting through ScholarOne, please select this special issue/section option. As per  TC policies, only full-length papers (12 pages) can be submitted to special issues/sections and each author’s bio should not exceed 150 words.  

Questions?

Contact the Lead Guest Editor at akjones@pitt.edu

• Alex Jones, University of Pittsburgh, USA
• Sudeep Pasricha, Colorado State, USA
• Jeronimo Castrillon, TU Dresden, Germany