Systems and Software for Averting an Energy Crisis

Please join us for the Orange County ACM Chapter's bi-monthly evening program series.

Systems and Software for Averting an Energy Crisis

Agenda
6:30 PM Doors Open & Networking
7:00 PM Announcements and Presentation
8:30 PM Meeting Adjourned

Event Details
The US Department of Energy projects that by the year 2055, given current projected growth, electrical demand for devices including the internet will exceed the capacity of planet Earth to provide that power. The electrical demands on data processing centers in a world of AI and cryptocurrency on top of standard workloads lead the industry down an unsustainable path. Hyperscale systems are feverishly adding processing, memory, storage, connectivity fabric, and communications at an alarming rate. Software engineers need to be part of the total cost of ownership calculation to address this energy crisis.
This talk details some key aspects of the system architectures that are being deployed in data centers, with focus on data movement between resources. Every time data is moved there is inherent inefficiency; we will calculate the wasted data movement in key parts of the system architecture. With this analysis, it is clear that the expansion of the data center architecture has exacerbated the variations in access latency time to each resource as well.

Software developers can leverage knowledge of the energy flow through the system to improve efficiency. Gains can be made on every level from the choice of machine level data types – to choice of high level languages – to various programmer interfaces between the application and the hardware resources. The variations in media access latency are only getting wider and more complex, so software developers are tasked with comprehending not only what data to process but where to place it in the system hierarchy.

The call to action will summarize some of the specific ways careful software engineering can help us avert the looming power crisis.

Speaker
Bill Gervasi is Principal Systems Architect for Wolley Inc, designing advanced memory and storage solutions for data centers, artificial intelligence engines, and automotive designs. He chairs the JEDEC Alternative Memories committee, is working chair of the NSF CEMSYS
computer memory research collaboration, and Board member for BRDG – bridge to connect education outreach program. Some milestones in Bill’s career include introduction of DDR SDRAM into the standardization process and development of the initial specification, invention of the registered memory module architecture used in all the world’s Internet servers, and creation of the Automotive Solid State Drive specification.

Co-sponsors
This event is co-sponsored by the IEEE Orange County Computer Society, SIGAI OC, the IEEE OC Solid-State Circuit Society (SSCS) and the Los Angeles Chapter of the ACM.

Venue & Parking
This meeting will be held at the Knobbe Martens' Irvine offices. Parking validation will be provided to attendees.