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Researchers at 好色先生TV are developing new technology that could lower how much energy data centers need to operate, reducing the strain on the energy grid that Americans rely on.

Why it matters

The electricity required to run data centers, specifically those powering artificial intelligence, is straining the U.S. energy grid. AI energy demands are projected to聽 in the next few years, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, and could represent as much as 12% of the country鈥檚 total energy consumption by 2028.听

The financial cost of rising energy demands is already driving up the聽 of Americans across the country, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, an independent federal agency that collects and analyzes data about energy and the economy.听

Designing energy-efficient servers

, an assistant professor of聽 in the聽, and her team are designing computer servers that require less energy over their lifecycle.

鈥淲e are computer architects and systems researchers, which means that we try to figure out how we can design the data center hardware devices in ways that are more efficient and sustainable,鈥� Sriraman said.

To do that, Sriraman鈥檚 team blends new and old technology by applying the sustainable resource management principles of reducing and reusing toward server hardware design.听

鈥淲e call them 鈥榗arbon-efficient servers,鈥欌�� she said. 鈥淥ur new hardware design is able to run things more efficiently and it鈥檚 also more sustainable.鈥�

Balancing these environmental goals is a central part of Sriraman鈥檚 work. Her lab reuses older server components to delay them from being landfilled, and the new parts they incorporate are much more energy efficient.听

鈥淭here鈥檚 a tradeoff,鈥� she said. 鈥淥n the one hand, reusing older components might be less energy efficient. But if I鈥檓 keeping a component around longer, that means I don鈥檛 have to use energy to manufacture a new component.鈥�

Big tech companies are already adopting the technology. Sriraman said Microsoft is exploring the adoption of her designs for both internal and public cloud customers. As customer interest grows, she explained, Microsoft is considering her designs as an important strategy to meet Microsoft鈥檚 publicly stated 2030 decarbonization targets.听聽

The impact is significant. The adoption of these efficient servers by large cloud companies can eliminate the annual carbon footprint of entire nations, according to Sriraman.听

鈥淭hese carbon-efficient servers鈥� widespread use can cut roughly 100 million of the 2.5 billion metric tons of carbon emissions that the cloud is projected to emit by 2030, equivalent to eliminating annual emissions from entire countries like Qatar or Venezuela,鈥� she said. 鈥淪o that is a really nice result for us.鈥�

A new kind of chip

The processing chips that make computers run are made up of complex electrical circuits and can be thought of as the central command centers of the computer. For general purpose computing, there are two different types 鈥� CPUs and GPUs 鈥斅燾entral processing units and graphics processing units. Making them more energy efficient can have a big impact.听

, an electrical and computer engineering professor, 补苍诲听, an associate professor in the聽鈥檚听created a brand new type of chip architecture to do that. Their company, Efficient Computer, recently announced聽 in new funding to expand the work.听

鈥淓fficient鈥檚 architecture is a fundamentally new type of processor for general purpose computing,鈥� said Lucia, Efficient Computer鈥檚 CEO. Traditional processors constantly retrieve instructions from memory, and move data around inside the chip frequently. These steps use a lot of energy and might be repeated billions of times per second. 鈥淲e have a new way of mapping software into hardware, which eliminates the need to fetch new instructions cycle by cycle, and improves how data flows in the chip. We eliminate a huge energy sink.鈥�

The physical architecture of Efficient Computer鈥檚 new processor means it can move data and carry out instructions using just a fraction of the energy traditional CPUs or GPUs require.听

鈥淲e are 10 times more energy efficient than the best low-power general purpose computers on the market today,鈥� Lucia said. 鈥淢eaning, if you hook ours up to a battery, hook theirs up to a battery, you just run a general purpose computation over and over 鈥� ours will last 10 times longer. A few weeks become years.鈥�