about

A decade of the cloud movement has inadvertently produced global year-on-year data centre energy efficiencies. Over this period, total data centre electricity use has barely grown, but we are using over 500x more (virtualised) servers. Recently the world has been captured by a disruption popularised by ChatGPTv3 - how Large Language Model forms of deep learning AI will imminently transform business, society and research. Unlike the Web-2.0 era, adapting LLMs to an organisation or project is compute-intensive, requiring dedicated use of traditionally HPC-scale facilities. The electricity needed for data centres will explode, raising significant environmental and cost questions. Are we ready for this? 

structure of the day

The objective of the day is to

• educate on the AI-driven transition and how this will affect the digital infrastructure landscape and inform sovereign direction

• showcase some emerging approaches & technologies to mitigate and alleviate

• produce a summary report will be openly published, and

• bring the community of stakeholders together

To achieve this, the workshop will be interactive in assessing the current awareness and barriers to systemic co-design. The structure of the workshop is as follows:

1. welcome and context

2. perspectives from large research-centric datacentres

3. exposure to emerging sustainability driven AI technology vendors

4. exposure to research and industry driving AI platforms, and 

5. consolidating learnings & next steps​

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The questions and deliberations will be centred on the following themes:

• [E] environmental sustainability

• [S] AI DRI role in supply chain, scarcity & sovereignty

• [I] AI DRI role in industry, commercialisation, new ecosystems

• [T] AI DRI role transforming global disciplines to AI

• [F] FAIR in the context of AI

• [L] literacy/skills