Prashant Shenoy

Abstract Title

Data Centers, AI Workloads, and Efficiency: A Systems Perspective The exponential growth of cloud computing has been a defining trend of our time, fueled by rapidly growing demands from online and data-intensive  workloads. Despite the end of Denard scaling, the cloud's energy demand grew more slowly than expected over the past decade due to the aggressive implementation of energy-efficiency optimizations. However, the rise of AI workloads, which are often more resource-intensive than traditional cloud workloads, has led to rapid growth in data centers with power-hungry accelerators such as GPUs and TPUs, leading to a resurgence in the cloud's energy consumption and a strain on our electric grids.

In this talk, I will provide a systems perspective on the challenges and opportunities in enhancing the efficiency and sustainability of cloud platforms in the face of rising AI demand. I will discuss how systems resource management techniques such as workload shifting can enhance the efficiency of cloud platforms by exploiting the spatio-temporal variability in grid demand, energy availability, and electricity prices.  I will then discuss how these systems techniques introduce new tradeoffs in performance, efficiency, and cost during their operations and present ideas for navigating these tradeoffs. I will end with several open research challenges that the systems community needs to tackle to ensure the continued growth of AI-driven cloud platforms.

 

Biography

Prashant Shenoy is currently a Distinguished Professor and Associate Dean in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He received the B.Tech degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and the M.S and Ph.D degrees in Computer Science from the University of Texas, Austin. His research interests lie in distributed systems and networking, with a recent emphasis on cloud and sustainable computing. He has been the recipient of several best paper awards at leading conferences, including two ACM Test of Time Awards. He is a fellow of the ACM, IEEE, AAAS, and AAIA.

Contact

shenoy@cs.umass.edu