SUSTAINABILITY SEMINAR SERIES: 

ABSTRACT: 

As society's interest in generative AI models and their capabilities continues to soar, we are witnessing an unprecedented surge in compute demand. This surge is stressing every aspect of the cloud ecosystem at a time when hyperscale providers are striving to become carbon-neutral. In this talk, I will address the challenges in managing the power, energy, and sustainability of this expanding AI infrastructure. I will also overview some of my team's early efforts to tackle these challenges and explore potential research avenues going forward. Ultimately, we will need a massive research and development effort to create a more sustainable and efficient future for AI.

SPEAKER BIO

Dr. Ricardo Bianchini is a Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President at Microsoft Azure, where he leads the team responsible for managing Azure’s Compute workload, server capacity, and datacenter infrastructure with a strong focus on efficiency and sustainability.  Before joining Azure in 2022, Ricardo led the Systems Research Group and the Cloud Efficiency team at Microsoft Research (MSR).  During his tenure at MSR, he created research projects in power efficiency and intelligent resource management that resulted in large-scale production systems across Microsoft.  Prior to joining Microsoft in 2014, he was a Professor at Rutgers University, where he conducted research in datacenter power and energy management, energy-aware storage systems, energy-aware load distribution across datacenters, and leveraging renewable energy in datacenters.  Ricardo is a Fellow of both the ACM and IEEE.