Two concerns dominating global discussions are the acceleration
of Artificial Intelligence and its drain on sustainable energy
development. AI has become a super-consumer of energy, and its
appetite is growing larger by the day. JB Baker, VP of Products for
ScaleFlux, understands that innovation and preservation are not
mutually exclusive. Solid-state drives and Arm-based solutions
enable AI infrastructures to maintain high performance while
remaining energy-efficient, bringing about the best of both
worlds.
MILPITAS, Calif., May 6, 2024
/PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The apocryphal tale of Benjamin Franklin venturing out into a storm
with kite and key in hand set the stage for the 21st century's
voracious appetite for electricity. Artificial Intelligence has
proved to be a glutton for energy consumption. The amount of
computing power necessary for AI machine learning is doubling every
six months. (1) Data center behemoths like Amazon Web Services,
Microsoft, and Google are looking to reduce their carbon footprint,
increase efficiency, and reduce energy costs. To comply with this
trend, the IT infrastructure is evolving towards a more distributed
compute architecture and a broader variety of processor cores and
types (such as Arm-based CPUs and system-on-chip processors). JB
Baker, VP of Products for ScaleFlux says, "Large-scale AI workloads
rely heavily on memory and networking, putting much of the current
focus on alleviating bottlenecks in these areas. However, with the
petabyte and exabyte scale of the datasets used in AI, power and
efficiencies of the underlying storage infrastructure are quietly a
major challenge. Improving the pipeline between storage, memory,
and GPUs with solutions like solid-state drives (SSDs) enhanced
with computational storage capabilities is critical in enabling
companies to achieve their efficiency and energy sustainability
goals."
"Artificial Intelligence has proved to be a glutton for
energy consumption. The amount of computing power necessary for AI
machine learning is doubling every six months."
A data center is a tangible space dedicated to housing IT
infrastructure. Its purpose is to construct, operate, and provide
applications and services while also serving as the storage and
management hub for the associated data. Once privately owned for
the exclusive use of one company, data centers have evolved into
remote facilities managed by cloud service providers that house a
virtualized IT infrastructure shared among multiple companies and
customers. (2) Of the 10,978 data center locations worldwide, 5,388
are in the United States. (3)
Newmark's new U.S. Data Center Market report says that the U.S.
data center footprint will more than double from 17 gigawatts in
2022 to 35 gigawatts in 2030. (4)
Troubling statistical data strongly suggests that data centers
and data transmission networks are infringing on global efforts to
improve the sustainability of energy resources and minimize harm to
the environment. The Department of Energy reports that data centers
consume up to 50x as much energy per floor space as conventional
commercial office buildings. (5)
In January, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released its
forecast for global energy consumption for the next two years.
Notably, the report included projections for electricity usage
linked to data centers, cryptocurrency, and artificial
intelligence for the first time. According to the IEA, these
sectors combined accounted for nearly 2% of global energy demand in
2022. The agency predicts that by 2026, demand for these services
could double, reaching a level approximately equivalent to the
whole of Japan's electricity
consumption. (6)
AI models are trained using copious data, and the more complex
and popular an AI model is, the more requests it receives and the
more energy it uses. Training can take from just a few minutes to
months, based on the amount of data and the AI's level of
sophistication. GPUs, the electronic circuits or computer chips
that perform the computational tasks used in machine learning, run
24 hours a day, devouring vast amounts of energy while the AI model
deduces a user query, processes it, thinks about it, and provides
the answer. (7)
This perfect storm of data-hungry tech and its unquenchable need
for more energy to power increasingly sophisticated data processing
needs cannot be calmed without changes to the IT architecture.
A solid-state drive (SSD) is a mass storage device with no
moving parts, unlike a spinning hard disk drive (HDD). It stores
data on integrated circuits, utilizing flash memory for faster data
access compared to traditional HDDs. SSDs boast considerably faster
accessing speeds than HDDs, resulting in accelerated file
transfers, reduced power consumption, increased durability against
physical damage, and quieter operation. SSDs offer instant system
boot-up, seamless multitasking, better system cooling, and flexible
storage options. (8)
Data center operators prioritize power efficiency, component
dependability, RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability),
and storage and performance density. SSDs have transformed
enterprise data centers with high-speed performance and agility,
critical in split-second decision-making. SSDs offer rapid data
access, energy savings, and compact size, optimizing space and
scalability. (9)
In computational storage solutions like SSDs, aspects of data
processing become localized on the drive where the data is stored,
providing additional processing capability to the server. Rather
than transmitting data over long distances, localized data
processing minimizes latency, energy consumption, and bandwidth
utilization. And since data stays on the drive, computational
storage solutions enhance privacy and security. (10)
Arm-based computing uses an advanced RISC (Reduced Instruction
Set Computer) microprocessor architecture design that features
lower power consumption, better efficiency, lower cost, and higher
performance than traditional x86 CISC (Complex Instruction Set
Computing) architectures. Arm server processors offer extensive
scalability and can manage workloads from lightweight web servers
to high-performance computing tasks. Their lower power consumption
and higher performance make them a popular choice for AI and ML
algorithms in data centers. (11)
ScaleFlux is the computational storage leader, helping
businesses get more from their data infrastructure and budget at
scale. Their transformational SSDs embed intelligent computational
storage technology to perform storage computing directly in the
data path, optimizing the data pipeline for enhanced scalability.
ScaleFlux's smarter SSD transparently compresses and accelerates
data to double performance and efficiency. It supports its
customers in reaching their sustainability goals, enabling more
data storage per gigabyte of flash, reducing the requirement for
extra components, and decreasing environmental waste.
ScaleFlux's upcoming incorporation of the Arm® Cortex®-R82
processor into its next-generation enterprise SSD controllers is
poised to amplify data processing performance and efficiency across
data centers and AI infrastructures worldwide. This cutting-edge
technology offers unprecedented data transfer speeds and energy
efficiency to meet the growing demands for higher bandwidth and
energy-efficient storage solutions.
Baker affirms, "ScaleFlux's innovative and reliable technologies
facilitate the seamless integration of AI acceleration into
existing data infrastructures. Its market-leading computational
storage solutions balance technological ambition and environmental
stewardship. ScaleFlux helps businesses optimize their IT
infrastructure with an efficient, data-centric, and environmentally
responsible architecture."
About ScaleFlux
In an era where data reigns supreme, ScaleFlux emerges as the
vanguard of computational storage solutions, poised to redefine the
landscape of IT infrastructure. With a commitment to innovation,
ScaleFlux introduces a revolutionary approach to storage that
seamlessly combines hardware and software, designed to unlock
unprecedented performance, efficiency, and scalability for
data-intensive applications. As the world stands on the brink of a
data explosion, ScaleFlux's cutting-edge technology offers a beacon
of hope, promising not just to manage the deluge but to transform
it into actionable insights and value, heralding a new dawn for
businesses and data centers worldwide. For more details, visit
https://scaleflux.com/.
References:
1. L, Jennifer. "The Carbon Countdown: AI
and Its 10 Billion Rise in Power Use." Carbon Credits, 28 Feb. 2024,
carboncredits.com/carbon-countdown-ais-10-billion-rise-in-power-use-explodes-data-center-emission/.
2. "What Is a Data Center?" IBM,
ibm.com/topics/data-centers. Accessed 22
Apr. 2024.
3. Minnix, John. "113 Data Center Stats You
Should Know in 2024." Brightlio, 11 Apr.
2024,
brightlio.com/data-center-stats/#:~:text=Global%20Data%20Center%20Statistics,worldwide%20as%20of%20December%202023.
4. Rogers, Jack. "U.S. Data Center Demand
Will Double by 2030." GlobeSt, 11 Jan.
2024,
globest.com/2024/01/11/u-s-data-center-demand-will-double-by-2030/#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20data%20center%20footprint,Center%20Market%20report%20from%20Newmark.
5. "Data Centers and Servers." Energy.Gov,
energy.gov/eere/buildings/data-centers-and-servers. Accessed
26 Apr. 2024.
6. Calvert, Brian. "Ai Already Uses as Much
Energy as a Small Country. It's Only the Beginning." Vox,
28 Mar. 2024,
vox.com/climate/2024/3/28/24111721/ai-uses-a-lot-of-energy-experts-expect-it-to-double-in-just-a-few-years.
7. Clark, Tim. "SAP Brandvoice: Why Does Ai
Consume so Much Energy?" Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 23 Dec. 2023,
forbes.com/sites/sap/2023/12/20/why-does-ai-consume-so-much-energy/?sh=298c82c22ede.
8. "Everything You Need to Know about
Solid-State Drives (SSD)." Arts Computing Office Newsletter,
13 Apr. 2020,
uwaterloo.ca/arts-computing-newsletter/winter-2018/feature/everything-you-need-know-about-solid-state-drives-ssd.
9. Solutions, Reliance. "SSD in the
Enterprise: How Solid State Drives Transform Data Centers." Medium,
Medium, 31 Jan. 2024,
medium.com/@reliancesolutions/ssd-in-the-enterprise-how-solid-state-drives-transform-data-centers-8b99b4912bcb.
10. Ltd., Arm. "What Is Computational
Storage?" Arm,
arm.com/glossary/computational-storage#:~:text=Computational%20storage%20is%20a%20storage,application%20performance%20and%20infrastructure%20efficiency.
Accessed 22 Apr. 2024.
11. "What Are ARM-Based Servers? Comparison
with X86, Benefits and Drawbacks." 2023,
cloudpanel.io/blog/arm-based-servers/. Accessed 22 Apr. 2024
Media Contact
Karla Jo Helms, JOTO PR™,
727-777-4629, khelms@jotopr.com, jotopr.com
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