This efficient data center will power research across the University while creating advances in sustainable computing
The AI, machine learning and data science technologies revolutionizing society consume huge amounts of energy. To continue benefitting from these technologies while reducing their ecological footprint, we urgently need breakthroughs in green computing.
The Green Room is a state-of-the-art facility in M4 that will power large-scale computations across the Faculty while allowing researchers to study and improve resource efficiency. Here, researchers will explore and document the various relationships and trade-offs between resource input and application objectives for large-scale computing. With access to the full technology stack–including hardware, system-level software, and network configuration–they can experiment with different component arrangements to optimize resource use. The goal is to develop practical guidelines for improving resource-conscious computing that can be widely adopted across society.
The Green Room represents a bold step towards green computing and a much-needed upgrade to the Faculty’s current computing infrastructure. It will help attract leading researchers from around the world, drive pioneering research at the intersection of STEM disciplines and foster new breakthroughs in resource-conscious computing.
Computing uses a significant amount of energy, and it's only supposed to be growing with the advent of AI and machine learning. The server room that we’re going to put into the fifth floor of M4 will be designed to give us extremely good insight into the entire technology stack and will enable us to correlate power consumption with the computation that's going on. As far as I know, no other facility like this exists in Canada.
