[Music] you're watching in technology a videocast where you can get smarter about cyber security sustainability and Technology here are your hosts Tom Garrison and Camille morehart hello and welcome to in technology I'm your host Tom Garrison and with me as always is my co-host Camille moreheart and today we have an amazing guest Tamar Alum she is an IBM fellow and chief scientist for sustainable Computing she's been at IBM research since 2000 and has 20 years of experience in pioneering disruptive Technologies she's passionate about applying Innovation to address the biggest problems Humanity faces today so welcome Tamar thank you thank you and thank you for inviting me that's a great opportunity yeah we're excited to talk about this today because we're going to talk about sustainability and try to to Really level set folks on what is sustainability and and why does it matter and and those sorts of things so let's first though start off with just the basics from your point of view as an expert in the field what is sustainability and why is it so important when it comes to Computing devices climate change is the number one most important challenge that humanity is facing today so as we all know the climate is changing and it's becoming more hot which leads to extreme events such as drought and floods and we really cannot continue on the current trajectory which is going to lead lead us basically a hot house and in order to change the trajectory that we're on today the number one thing that Humanity can do is to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere and reduce the carbon emission that is the result of human activity and this cuts across all the sectors so um such as a supply chain and Manufacturing and also obviously the power grade and the packaging distribution Logistics and Computing and I'm going to get into Computing next why is it in particularly important to focus on Computing looking at all the sectors why Computing okay so the issues that are specific to Computing is that really we are at an inflection point where there are multiple trends that are obvious and that are happening today and one is the exponential data and data transfer like everything is on zoom and uh and all these video transfer games and so on then there is the new emerging workloads in the cloud that are very energy hungry such as AI so if you look just at the eye which is obviously very popular for very good reasons the energy for training AI jobs doubles every three to four months so that's that's like crazy every three to four months the energy for training AI jobs doubles and AI look I is an amazing tool and you know we're in IBM are all for embracing AI we're doing AI or a living Ai and that's because AI can help us actually um really face all of these challenges including discovery of material for carbon capture including analyzing satellite images and predicting climatic events AI is a great tool however with power comes responsibility as I like to say so how can we use AI responsibly and how can we really work to make AI more efficient so just that's the second Trend and then the third trend is has to do with the the demise of the nard scaling also known as the flattening of Moore's Law And basically what that says is that we cannot continue to expect to get the efficiency improvements from general purpose Computing tips like we used to get every two years you get Energy Efficiency more energy efficient and more energy efficient and more energy efficient and that's because we reached the limits of physics and that's why there is a move to specialized systems and I I will talk about specialized systems and why it's important later but because of these three Trends data explosion hungry power hungry workloads and the demise of Denard scaling this has raised has caused some to raise the alarm on the increasing energy consumption of computing in general in fact the semiconductor Corporation published a report of the Cato report and basically the bottom line there is the the energy for computing overall is growing in a faster rate than the energy that we're producing period and the power producing period and that's a problem because obviously we need more Computing but we need more efficient Computing we've been talking about data centers and the same applies also on clients so the the the client devices themself you have the sort of amount of energy and the amount of of carbon footprint you associated with building the device and then and then you have the amount of energy that it takes to operate the device and and I know one of the things at least from my uh you know dealings in this world I I was I was really taken back that on for example on a laptop the amount of energy over the device's entire life most of the carbon footprint is associated with building the device about 80 percent of the carbon associated with the entire life of the device is associated with building it only 20 is in use on the server side it's exactly the opposite it's twenty percent is embodied uh in building the server and eighty percent is over its life uh operational life and the and the interesting thing is that a server's carbon footprint is about 10x what a client is over its life so uh it's it's uh depending on which kind of device you're talking about and you want to reduce the carbon you would have a a very different set of actions to try to reduce that carbon footprint depending on the type of device you're using exactly exactly and I was also astonished I don't discover this fact I uh learned about it a few months ago and it's really a mind-boggling that you see this difference and indeed you're introducing the second dimension so when I talked before about the energy for it the power usage Effectiveness and the source of the energy the carbon emission factor I was only referring to the operations phase of the life cycle but another dimension here is the entire life cycle of that compute device and you're exactly right when it comes to the um end users consumer devices such as laptops and iPhones and all sorts all of these devices manufacturing the device is where most of the carbon footprint goes to and that's why I was like resisting buying a new iPhone because I didn't want to have that carbon footprint I'm like fix it fix it for me but sometimes you have no choice right and it comes when it comes to the servers it's actually the opposite and then in a data center the question becomes where do I go and buy a new more efficient server and it's really a balancing act between sort of a step function in the life cycle when you buy a new server so there is Oak there is this manufacturing carbon footprint that goes together with that but you may gain inefficiency so you may become more efficient as you run the server and you run the software because servers become more efficient so and that's exactly the way to think about it can you explain you know what kinds of things what kinds of practices we're doing sort of globally that are not helping us you know over the last 20 years and then what kinds of things are truly going do you think we're there you said it's a Tipping Point for the climate but is there a Tipping Point for us and what we can do with technology at this point or are we just still marching down this path with arrows going up and down yeah it's a really good question and I'm looking at it more from an outsider so I can observe Trends I think more than someone who is always doing this you know and what I'm saying is that the systems guys the systems Hardware they always had energy in line always when you talk with systems guys with the people that are actually designing chips they always try to improve the Energy Efficiency they always try to have the chip smaller and more energy efficient so that's not not news for them they've been doing it forever software people people that are actually writing code absolutely no idea absolutely no idea so with the years we see the introduction of a new operating systems and new platforms and cloud computing and serverless and all these trends and some of it is good so for example when you look at cloud computing in general cloud computing is good for sustainability why because it's more efficient when you have these exoscalers they have more efficient Hardware they're purchasing more in your ability but they also have automation so because they're automating and they also have economy of scale so workloads of different clients can run on the same Hardware if they're smart about it they can do very sophisticated multiplexing so they get more efficiency more utilization and the automation you know grow and Shrink maybe power down machines so that's why cloud is actually very good for sustainability however in general with software because there is lack of awareness we're reaching the point where we have more and more specialized systems that introduce latest latencies of microseconds such as different accelerators and non-volatile memory Technologies and so on but because of the levels of indirection that you have in the software stack we're not always able to utilize it in the best way so we need to catch up with software awareness to sustainability and I'm not sure if I I answered your question because maybe your question was a little bit broader than that I was really focusing on sustainable computing yeah well I mean it it is broader also I guess I thank you for that specific answer on Computing and then I guess just do you have a more General answer as well for uh for technology I mean we can keep it to technology but look the way I look at it technology is our only chance to combat climate change we can't undo the Industrial Revolution and we can't undo the Industrial Revolution because we have too many people living on Earth and we can't feed all these people so we can't reverse the clock okay so technology and Innovation is our only chance to combat climate change and science obviously so we're making advances we need to obviously completely transform the power grade we need to introduce optimization in the way we're leveraging renewable energy the the which is the big big thing the thing with renewable energy is that it's Dynamic by its nature it's not constant so it's not predictable when you have wind then you have wind power when you don't have wind you don't have wind power if you have clouds you're getting less of solar energy right so how to deal with this in predictability we need to have ways to control or manage the load and to be able to plug it into our smart cities in the best way and we're not there yet but what is going to save us the only the only the only chance we have is introduce the introduce innovation in order to manage this now one place where I think that is a best match for the Dynamics of renewable energy is cloud computing why because of its Dynamic nature workloads can actually move with containers workloads can actually move to different zones to different regions and different tasks can run at different times so you can actually match the dynamicity of the cloud computing with the dynamicity of the grid and and thus maximize the usage of renewable energy you can't move a hospital you can take the hospital and move all the patients to a different region where you have more renewable energy at certain times of the day it's not even you have more it's you have more at certain times of the day but you can do it with cloud workloads and I know many people including us are developing the technology to do that so tomorrow you you talked a bit about uh the the hardware elements and and I think most people when they think about sustainability they think about things like I don't know Recycling and whatever it's physical the physical embodiment and they I think most people also kind of understand the efficiency of performance like you know how much how much work can you get done for the amount of energy you put in just like miles per gallon in your car so I think they kind of get that but what I I don't think people necessarily internalize as much on the in the technology world is the importance of software and how you can have the exact same device physical device and and in one sense running certain code and uh having a vastly different carbon footprint then the exact same machine but running different code and so can you speak a little bit about where where are we at from an industry standpoint on uh sustainable software you know sustainable code that runs on these devices I think we're really just clean the surface we're really just starting so from a high high level you need to divide two different things there is the code there is the actual code that implements the algorithm okay obviously if you have an algorithm that is more efficient and it's going to consume less energy then there is how you deploy the software okay so if you have most of the applications today are distributed where you put the data and where do you put the compute you want to put them in the same location okay so this is called like co-placement of that data and compute so you save on the communication uh overhead here and then there is the aspect of management of the data so every of the code so everything around the management is so important and I don't think that people realize it but if you take a platform such as kubernetes there is a placement algorithm there so you got your code is packaged as containers containers are lightweight that's a good thing but then as you get more and more pods there is a component there that places the pods on the Node how you place the pods on the Node will have an effect on efficiency how you determine the size of the container because the users don't know so they come up with a size for the container it's too big so vertical scaling is what we call a dynamically changing the size of the container will have an effect on efficiency so as I said it's not only how you write your code if you write your code obviously you want to leverage the most efficient libraries and things like that it's how you write your code it's how you deploy a distributed application and then it's how you manage the entire thing so tomorrow where where do you think um folks you know the people listening to this podcast today where can they get smarter on on what they should do you know where where they can either actions they can take or or uh you know people to listen to where where should you send them so we have a lot of material on our IBM website on um if they want to get educated about what is analog AI which is the future and what is and what we're doing with the digital AI which is the reduced Precision chip and so on that's one place in terms of how to write more efficient software I don't think there is one place that has that information it's really just emerging so it's everywhere we are trying to start a work group under cncf for sustainability so this would be a place to watch the sustainability work work group under cncf so this is just a few suggestions obviously there is the general area of sustainability and ghd protocol defines how things are measured and so on so there is a ton of material about just the basic stuff of and how do we measure how do we quantify what is the software what is the life cycle carbon footprint of products and then extrapolate from that to machines or software can I ask you you mentioned that in 2019 you listened to I think a lecture and it changed your life and you moved from cloud computing Architects to sustainability innovator um what did you hear what resonated with you that changed everything for you so this is a presentation that Steve Easterbrook a professor from University of Toronto gave in the XC conference which is the International Conference on software engineering that's ixy in Montreal and it was a keynote about climate he's a technologist that made the shift exactly like me to just work on climate and what he said this is I think June 2019 is that the UN report from 2018 that was very great was actually um really underestimating the problem that we're facing and the reason why it's underestimating the problem is because it didn't take into account the interrelationship between multiple different systems such as the farmer Frost melting in in the North Pole resulting in the release of methane to the atmosphere which is even accelerating the global warming even more and um as exactly as he said he said the research is going to come up and come out I followed it after I listened to this presentation and indeed research started coming out about saying the 2018 very grave report is underestimating the problem that we're facing and basically what he says and the takeaway from this talk was three different things is one talk about it talk about climate everywhere which is what we're doing now two is be political and what I mean by be political is take any opportunity to vote any opportunity that you have and three make it your job if you can as I said it sort of caught me and I couldn't stop thinking about it I I started asking everyone in IBM is okay what are we doing about Calamity what are we doing about climate I got pulled into multiple client conversations and even went to Singapore just before Coffee started and then in January 2020 IBM research decided to start a new program which is called the future of climate and I immediately joined and then covered hit and we all went down and started working together on future of climate and that's where I am until until today that's great so tomorrow uh this has been a great conversation I think to get uh people starting to think even if they haven't uh before that about the intricacies around sustainability and how it relates to Computing and and there's so much more that's going to be coming so thank you for coming in and we look forward to all of the exciting sort of discoveries that are going to be in this area moving forward here on YouTube or wherever you get your audio podcasts the views and opinions expressed are those of the guests and author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Intel Corporation [Music]
2022-11-21