NSF Compute-Energy Nexus in Chicago

The NSF Compute-Energy Nexus Workshop, hosted by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign at the Discovery Partners Institute in Chicago on December 8-9, 2025, was a two-day, invitation-only event that brought together experts from academia, industry and government to tackle the growing energy challenges facing data centers, AI and supercomputing. Through keynote talks, technical sessions and collaborative breakouts, participants explored innovative solutions at the intersection of the compute and energy infrastructures. The workshop aimed to define key research questions and launch a roadmap working group to guide future efforts in this critical space.

*Presentations have been attached to their titles. Click the titles below to access slides*

Agenda

December 8

8:00 a.m.

Coffee Service

8:30 a.m.

Welcome, Opening Remarks

9:00 a.m.

Keynote Addresses

Ruchir Puri (IBM) (Dawn of a new Era: Reimaging Business & Society with Intelligent Machines)
Prashant Shenoy (UMass) (Data Centers, AI Workloads, and Efficiency: A Systems Perspective)

10:00 a.m.

Break

10:15 a.m.

Stakeholder Session
Howard Gugel (NERC) (Reliability Impacts of Inverter Based Technology)
Andrew Chien (UChicago) (Facing the Computing’s Challenges at the End of Technology Scaling – the Power/Energy-Compute Nexxus)
Alaa Youssef (IBM)(Where are we heading with Generative AI?)

Panel Discussion (30 min)

11:30 a.m.

Breakout Session 1: Identification of Stakeholders & Needs

12:00 p.m.

Report Out

12:15 p.m.

Lunch

1:15 p.m.

Grid Integration
Jian Huang (UIUC) (Towards Sustainable AI Infrastructure: Chips, Servers, and Racks)
Nathaniel Rice (Dominion) (Utility Perspective of Large Digital Loads)
Brian Zahnstecher (Power Rox) (Keeping Both the Grid and Load Happy in Muli-MW Data Center Implementations)

Panel Discussion (30 min)

2:30 p.m.

Break

2:45 p.m.

Parallel Sessions
Session A: Thermal and Water Management
Kashif Nawaz (ORNL) (Turning Heat into Opportunity: Next-Generation Waste Heat Recovery for Data Centers and Computational Ecosystems)
Davide Ziviani (Purdue) (Impact of Degradation Phenomena on Reliability and Energy Efficiency of Data Centers)
Praveen Kumar (UIUC) (Beyond the Compute–Energy Nexus: Integrating Regional Water Availability into the Infrastructure Equation)

Session B: Chip & System Architecture
Karu Sankaralingam (NVIDIA) (Serving Intelligence: The Unseen Limits of LLM Inference and the Hardware Race to Overcome Them)
Can Hankendi (Boston University) (Enabling Sustainable and Grid-Aware AI Data Centers
Josep Torrellas (UIUC) (Addressing Energy Inefficiencies in Datacenter Infrastructure)

3:45 p.m.

Breakout Session 2: Identification of Critical Roadblocks

4:15 p.m.

Report Out

4:30 p.m.

Day 1 Closing Remarks (5 min)

5:00 p.m.

Social Hour

December 9

8:00 a.m.

Light Breakfast (30 min)

8:30 a.m.

Power Distribution and Management
Srdjan Lukic (NCSU) (Advancing Power Distribution in Data Centers Through Solid-State Transformer (SST) Technology)
Rajesh Gopinath (Oracle) (Gigawatts at the Speed of AI: Power System Realities of the Next-Generation Data Center Campus)
William Schaumann (Burns & McDonnell) (Evolution of Datacenter Designs)

Panel Discussion (30 min)

9:45 a.m.

Break

10:00 a.m.

Datasets, Modeling and Algorithms
Bruce Tsuchida (Brattle) (Loads of Loads)
Mohammad Hajiesmaili (UMass) (Algorithmic Foundations of Grid-Integrated AI Infrastructure)
Abdeltawab Hendawi (URI) (How Hungry is AI? Benchmarking Energy, Water, and Carbon Footprint of LLM Inference)

Panel Discussion (30 min)

11:15 a.m.

Breakout Session 3: Critical Short- and Long-Term Actions to be Taken

11:45 a.m.

Report Out

12:00 p.m.

Lunch

1:00 p.m.

Ultra-Scale Systems
Isik Kizilyalli (Avalanche Thinking) (Data Centers and Artificial (General) Intelligence Energy Consumption in the Next Decade)
Sushma Prasad (Google) (Towards Ultra-scale energy efficiency)
Tanya Das (Formerly Bipartisan Policy Center) (Aligning America’s AI Infrastructure Strategy)

Panel Discussion (30 min)

2:15 p.m.

Break

2:30 p.m.

Summary and Road Mapping Next Steps

3:00 p.m.

Concluding Remarks

3:30 p.m.

Adjourn

Planning Committee

Technical Co-Chairs

Philip Krein
Grainger Endowed Chair Emeritus, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Rakesh Kumar
Professor and John Bardeen Faculty Scholar, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Klara Nahrstedt
Grainger Distinguished Chair of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; DPI Director of Research

TECHNICAL MEMBERS

Craig Bradshaw
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Rolando Burgos
Virginia Tech

Prasad Enjeti
Texas A&M University

Srdjan Lukic
North Carolina State University

Andrew Stillwell
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Salman Nasir
SemiTech Insights

Mohamed Arafa
SemiTech Insights

ADMINISTRATIVE COMMITTEE

Jess Dalhaus
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Brent Brewer
Discovery Partners Institute

Kassandra Perez
Discovery Partners Institute

Josh Potts
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Karen Colat
Discovery Partners Institute

Jason Bane
Discovery Partners Institute