Scoring and Gamification to Encourage Sustainable Use of Compute Clusters

Abstract

The environmental cost of computing continues to grow, yet behaviour change remains limited. We present a composite sustainability score integrating average carbon intensity, resource utilisation, and embodied emissions into a single 0-100 metric designed for gamified feedback. Each component rewards a different dimension of sustainable behaviour: carbon-aware workload shifting, high resource utilisation, and selecting hardware that is commonly underutilised. This scoring system is built into an existing cluster management interface and underpins three dashboard conditions: raw metrics, composite score, and a gamified tree visualisation, which we are planning to evaluate in a 12-week within-subjects study with approximately 35 researchers. Furthermore, we open the discussion on the challenge of defining computational work `goodness' in the context of sustainability scores.