CORE MACHINE LEARNING

SYSTEMS RESEARCH

Beyond Efficiency: Scaling AI Sustainably

June 07, 2024

Abstract

Barroso’s seminal contributions in energy- proportional warehouse-scale computing launched an era where modern datacenters have become more energy efficient and cost effective than ever before. At the same time, modern AI applications have driven ever-increasing demands in computing, highlighting the importance of optimizing efficiency across the entire deep learning model development cycle. This paper characterizes the carbon impact of AI, including both operational carbon emissions from training and inference as well as embodied carbon emissions from datacenter construction and hardware manufacturing. We highlight key efficiency optimization opportunities for cutting-edge AI technologies, from deep learning recommendation models to multi-modal generative AI tasks. To scale AI sustainably, we must also go beyond efficiency and optimize across the life cycle of computing infrastructures, from hardware manufacturing to datacenter operations and end-of-life processing for the hardware.

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AUTHORS

Written by

Carole-Jean Wu

Bilge Acun

Ramya Raghavendra

Kim Hazelwood

Publisher

IEEE Micro Special Issue

Research Topics

Systems Research

Core Machine Learning

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