CSL Compute-Energy Nexus Workshop tackles energy generation issues

To say there are many data centers in the United States would be an understatement. These data centers pop up all over the country; some areas are more populated with them than others. While these data centers are generating data for many reasons, they are also consuming a lot of energy; energy we cannot generate quickly enough. This is a problem that researchers within The Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) through The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign collaborated with other groups to pinpoint the issue and figure out solutions during the CSL Compute-Energy-Nexus Workshop. 

The CSL Compute-Energy-Nexus Workshop was held in November 2024. CSL researchers came together with their industry partners to talk about these data centers, their energy optimization, and their efficient integration with the power grid.  CSL director Klara Nahrstedt and CSL professor Philip Krein were the co-Chairs of this workshop. 

Collaboration was key in this workshop as it helped these researchers to identify the problems these data centers are facing. The biggest issue being the amount of energy these data centers use and how energy cannot be produced quickly enough by the current power grid. “Really important points have been made in terms of the critical aspects of data center workloads such as the artificial intelligence workloads and their energy usage,” said Nahrstedt. She continued to say that many users of data centers do not know how energy is actually spent in the data centers.

 “The workshop was a great platform to bring people together and to clearly articulate the problem and the research challenges,” said electrical engineering professor Rakesh Kumar who worked with Nahrstedt, Krein, and others to organize the workshop.  Kumar used Loudoun County, Virginia as an example of large amounts of data centers being hosted in one area. “The Loudoun County is known as the data center alley of the United States,” said Kumar. “A large fraction of America’s data centers sits there.” He continued to say that if someone goes there with a billion dollars today and asks to set up a new data center there, they might not get the desired results. “They may give you your money back and they may tell you to come back later because they do not have enough power to supply a new data center. That’s already happening.” The CSL Compute-Energy-Nexus workshop studied what could be done when energy supply does not meet demands of data center applications such as artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency and other online applications.  

“This workshop was an opportunity for two very unique groups to come together that don’t usually talk to each other,” said Nahrstedt. “That is the power engineering group and the computing hardware/software group.” She said it is important to note how fortunate we are at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to have outstanding researchers in both groups because many universities do not have power engineering. “The Grainger College of Engineering is very unique in that sense and of course its Coordinated Science Lab as one of the Interdisciplinary Research Units in the college brings together the necessary groups from many different departments in the college of engineering to discuss the compute-energy-nexus challenges in data centers.” said Nahrstedt. “During the workshop, we identified many of the challenges and research efforts that are ongoing here. It really indicates that we are in a very good position to be leading the research efforts and look at the challenges holistically, these application workloads are causing.”

 Nahrstedt said there were “several really important challenges that were eye opening to me.” They identified the need to find a way to minimize energy to deal with dynamic renewable energy supplies. They discussed cooling of these centers which is a challenge that needs to be addressed.  Density in chips is another issue. The list of challenges really goes on and on. That was the beauty of this workshop. Researchers from all sorts of engineering groups (computer engineering, computer science, mechanical engineering, industrial engineering, nuclear engineering, etc.) came together to take on this energy issue, break it down into several areas to focus on and discuss new directions.  

With every problem comes some sort of solution, maybe even several. Kumar said they looked at what to do with all the heat these data centers generate. They thought, why not recycle it? “Maybe that heat that’s generated from the data center becomes the heating for a nearby school? Then there were other ideas that people have been looking at where you store that heat somehow.  

Nahrstedt discussed challenges of speeding up the creation of new power grids sources and using renewables to generate power. “Renewable energy sources are environmentally friendlier, but they are also very dynamic in their energy generation. Sometimes the sun shines, sometimes it doesn’t.” 

So, the workshop identified problem(s) and possible solutions in the scope of the Compute-Energy-Nexus for data centers. The workshop organizers and participants captured the insights of the workshop and created a report with the findings from this workshop to give interested parties a better understanding of the issues and dig deeper into the solutions.  

What’s the next step? The college is building on this momentum through a university-wide effort, focused on the Compute-Energy-Nexus problem.