WELCom is the Workshop on Efficiency, Longevity, and Circularity for more sustainable cOMputing. It is part of the HiPEAC conference 2027, held on Jan 18, 2027 – Jan 20, 2027 in Glasgow, United Kingdom.
University of Glasgow, Photo by Diliff, GNU Free Documentation License, version 1.2
Computing systems are often replaced long before their physical end of life because of software evolution, discontinued firmware and security support, changing deployment requirements, or economic incentives favoring replacement over maintenance and repair. In large-scale infrastructures, security constraints and the end of vendor support can force the decommissioning of otherwise functional hardware. At the same time, the environmental cost of manufacturing new equipment — including embodied energy, raw materials, and supply chains — is increasingly recognized as a major component of the overall impact of digital systems. While energy efficiency has long been a primary objective in computer architecture and systems research, and is still a key consideration in reducing operational emissions, the environmental impact of manufacturing, maintenance, premature replacement, and end-of-life processing is becoming equally critical.
The newly proposed WELCom workshop aims to explore sustainability in computing from a lifecycle perspective, bridging hardware, software, systems, and circular economy approaches. It will address the trade-offs between operational energy efficiency and embodied environmental costs, with particular attention to software-induced obsolescence and strategies to prolong the useful life of computing equipment.
Topics
The WELCom workshop is intended as an interdisciplinary forum bringing together researchers and practitioners from computer architecture, operating systems, embedded systems, datacenter infrastructure, lifecycle assessment, circular economy and sustainability. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Evaluation of the environmental impacts of hardware and software across the whole lifecycle
- Trade-offs between operational energy efficiency, embodied energy, and hardware longevity
- Methods and decision models to determine when systems should be upgraded, retrofitted, reused, or decommissioned
- Software obsolescence, long-term software maintenance, and sustainable system software
- Security support, firmware availability, and the sustainability impact of hardware end-of-support policies
- Retrofit, refurbishment, repairability, and second-life use of computing equipment
- Reuse of servers, accelerators, embedded systems, edge devices, and mobile devices
- Circular economy approaches for computing systems and datacenter infrastructure
- Business models and policies encouraging long-term support and “as-a-service” approaches
- Sustainability metrics, methodologies, and lifecycle assessment (LCA)
- Regulation, standards, and governance for sustainable computing infrastructures