Impact Framework Project Updates 2024-07-24

[jmcook1186]

Who

Sponsor: @jawache (GSF) Product owner: @jmcook1186 (GSF) Leads: @navveenb (Accenture), @srini1978 (Microsoft)

Overview

Another great fortnight for IF - we shipped a lot of updates that have brought us ahead of schedule on our i/o epic.

The most substantial change has been refactoring IF to implement "phased execution". This is an important change because it enables IF to run in a greener way because you do not have to re-execute an entire manifest when you want to make tweaks or run experiments.

We also moved away from exhaust plugins and towards exhaust scripts. This allows IF to be more feature minimal - it only outputs yaml files. Alternative output formats are now handled with separate scripts that take IF output yaml files as inputs.

I have been working on using IF to do a Lifecycle Assessment for our project, which has surfaced some interesting observations about how IF can be used for multiple purposes, including scope 3 carbon accounting and calculating SCi scores. To support this, we've shipped some new plugins, including one that wraps the Github API and one that wraps Green Coding Berlin's EcoCI API to grab energy and carbon stats for our Github actions.

We also added an "explainer" feature to IF that allows you to list out the parameters being ingested and output by each plugin and their units in the manifest, helping you to check the flow of units through an execution pipeline.

Finally, we've started to think about redesigning our project website to make it more accessible for our users, and also updated the existing website to explain all these IF protocol changes!

Updates

Here's the links to more details about the most significant changes made over the last fortnight.

• phased execution
• explainer feature
• github plugin
• eco-ci plugin
• docs website

Issues

We have had a great fortnight, with no notable blockers.

Outlook

• Release a new version that includes the above mentioned latest updates
• Continue working on enabling the Lifecycle Assessment for the IF Framework
  • #909
  • #910
• Add final touches to the Inputs & Outputs epic
  • #847
  • #820
• Continue work on updating the IF website and documentation