Energy efficient data centres

In 2020, due to the corona crises, digital infrastructures have provided indispensable added value for the cohesion of our society. As a substantial component of this infrastructure, data centers perform the primary digital work and act reliably in the background, broadly unnoticed since decades. Undeniably, the reliability of nowadays data centers, the flexibility of digital processes, their joint resilience against unforeseen has accelerated the transformation to digital ways of living and working. On the one hand, this new digital area has led to a reduced environmental impact due to changes in mobility and other behavioural constraints; on the other hand, it has generated increased demands for existing data center capacities and data center construction. Ultimately and again, this growth will lead to increased demands for resources such as electricity and emissions such as waste heat and electronic or construction waste. The economic pressure of is growth offers also an opportunity to show up with new innovative demand oriented data center architectures and holistic solutions, devoted to non-functional requirements and values of our society like sustainability and resource efficiency.

9^th International Workshop on Energy Efficient Data Centres (E²DC 2021)

The necessary scientific dialogue was and is the DNA E²DC 2021 workshop. It studies innovative methods to improve energy-efficiency and sustainability of all imaginable data centre variations. Importantly, E²DC regards a broader context of data centre ecosystem by investigating its integration and interactions with smart grids, smart cities and energy intense applications or platform ecosystems. A wide spectrum of topics ranging from the use of renewable energy over the control and optimisation of infrastructure services and emissions, demand response techniques to federation of distributed data centres.

This year, beside established topics, we will discuss the impact of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) on data centers. This technology can help to improve data centers in all areas, where mastering an increased system complexity results into higher efficiency, less emissions, more automation or better integration. This technology will foreseeably need optimized data center architectures and, analogous to the HPC data centers, challenge the one fits all concept and demand specialized variations. In addition to the focus on energy informatics, we specifically welcome interdisciplinary works.

Call for Papers

The workshop invites original papers up to 6 pages that were not published before and are currently not under consideration and/or review for publication elsewhere. Topics include, but are not limited to:

1. Innovative or improved architectures optimizing the data centre ecosystems to cope with dynamic demands and requirements of large service platform ecosystems:
   • Data centre integration with smart cities, smart grids and renewable energy sources
   • Modular DCs, Multicore Infrastructure DCs, DC Life Cycle Management
   • Best practices for sector coupling or symbiotic integration of data centres infrastructure into existing facilities (e.g. buildings, wind plants and other novel locations)
   • Novel cooling approaches, direct liquid cooling, heat re-use, thermal storage
2. Achieving energy efficiency by the innovative use of new hardware and software technologies, e.g.:
   • Microservers, low power CPUs, embedded SoCs
   • Methods to facilitate the use of hardware accelerators at large scale, the use and integration of heterogeneous systems
   • Virtualization and service architectures, containers, lightweight virtualization, microservices
   • Approaches for application centric and distributed/on the fly processing of data and information
   • New architectures and management methods for distributed data centres, edge data centres, fog computing and edge computing
3. Methods to improve uptake of energy efficient solutions in data centres, incentives that increase focus on energy efficiency and reduction of emissions:
   • New business models and programs to make the use of energy efficient technologies profitable
   • Metrics beyond PUE
   • Green and energy-related SLAs
   • Engaging end users in limiting energy consumption and carbon footprint
   • Other incentives leading to increased adoption of energy efficient technologies in data centres
4. Execution environments for and application of AI/ML:
   • Specialized DC architectures adapted to the IT systems executing AI application or platforms
   • Innovative application of AI using forecast, anomaly detection, clustering or predictive maintenance to obtain or gain sustainability and resource efficiency
   • AI optimized dc management of complex infrastructures and subsystems
   • Innovative application of AI like forecast, anomaly detection, clustering or predictive maintenance to obtain or gain sustainability and resource efficiency
   • Automated AI feature extraction for e.g individual key performance indicators or data center metrics for comparisons
   • AI based resource purchasing and procurement strategies
   • Automated anomaly detection and predictive maintenance optimizing risk managemt
   • AI based operation unlocking potential of demand response programs
   • Multi-criteria selection of configuration for trade-off between performance, efficiency, and gains from interaction with other stakeholders (e.g. smart grids, heat operators, consumers of heat, etc.)

Submission and publication of the work

The workshop will be co-located with ACM eEnergy 2021 Please submit your manuscript via submission portal. Manuscripts will be published in the ACM proceedings and must adhere to ACM format. Submission implies the willingness of at least one author to register and present the paper at E²DC. The organizers reserve the right to exclude a paper from publication if it is not presented. For more information please contact the organizers: Ariel Oleksiak (ariel at man.poznan.pl), Hayk Shoukourian (shoukourian at lrz.de), Gunnar Schomaker (schomaker at sicp.de)

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

E²DC WORKSHOP PROGRAM 2021

Contact

Ariel Oleksiak (ariel at man.poznan.pl)
Gunnar Schomaker (schomaker at sicp.de)