Smart Management for AI Power Consumption
by A.J. Kleber
As the ongoing AI boom exacerbates surging power consumption by data centers worldwide, electrical grids struggle to keep their balance; the balance between supply of and demand for electrical power. As the technology continues to advance and expand, and additional power-hungry data centers are built to support that growth, this insatiable demand for energy is only expected to increase exponentially. Making data centers energy-efficient is critical, in other words, to the future health and reliability of global energy systems and electrical grid management, as well as to realizing the potential of future advancements in AI and related technologies.
Fortunately, a pair of BU ECE faculty researchers are teaming up, with $600K in support from the NSF, to work on a solution they call “FlexDC: Flexible Artificial Intelligence Data Centers for Optimized Computing.”
Professor Ayse Coskun has a substantial portfolio of research into energy-efficiency for high-performance computing, and recently took up the mantle of Chief Scientist for Emerald AI, a commercial start-up focused on developing software to micromanage computing workloads dynamically in response to realtime grid conditions. Professor Emiliano Dall’Anese specializes in optimization and control for complex systems, particularly energy systems.They’re something of a dream team when it comes to tackling challenges in energy consumption for computing.
The FlexDC project focuses on developing a framework to regulate data center power consumption within grid and carbon constraints, while simultaneously providing performance guarantees to users. They plan to achieve this through a combination of planning and runtime optimization policy design, developing a global cost metric, and a variety of methods to address workload properties and constraints (such as parallel applications, job preemption, and other necessary trade-offs). The project will culminate in a prototype process for data centers to perform “flexible computing” as part of emerging smart grid programs.
Professor Ayse Coskun serves as the College of Engineering’s Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development, and Director of the Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE), in addition to her role in the ECE faculty. She is the recipient of a 2020 IBM Faculty Award (IBM Global University Program Academic Award) and several recent Best Paper Awards, among other honors. She holds the position of Chief Scientist with Emerald AI.
Professor Emiliano Dall’Anese joined the BU ECE faculty in 2024. His accolades include a 2020 NSF CAREER Award, Best Paper Awards from IEEE ISGT Europe (2024) and IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems (2023), and the IEEE Power and Energy Society Prize Paper Award (2021). He received his Ph.D. at the University of Padova, Italy, in 2011.