From dorms to trout ponds: Leveraging waste heat from AI computing

About this episode

This episode discusses the potential of utilizing waste heat from high performance computing facilities for energy sustainability.

This episode of The Future Built Smarter examines modern high performance computing facilities and the opportunity to use their waste heat as an energy source. “High performance facilities for computing are different than what most people would consider a data center,” says Brandon Fortier, IMEG's Director of Science and Technology. “Data centers serve general purpose IT needs for a building or a company, things like web hosting, cloud storage capabilities, et cetera. High performance facilities for computing serve more of a scientific or other research need. They use significantly more computing power because they're doing things like climate modeling or machine learning for AI.” Such energy-intensive AI deep learning computing requires an intense amount of cooling, which generates a significant amount of waste heat. In the right locations—such as on a healthcare, higher education, or federal campus, as well as private research campuses—this heat can be recovered and pushed into district energy systems for use in the heating of neighboring buildings, greatly supporting overall sustainability and greenhouse gas reduction goals in the process. “These high performance data centers…

People in this episode

Guests: Brandon Fortier, Ken Urbanek

Topics covered

• waste heat
• high performance computing
• energy sustainability
• AI computing
• district energy systems

Keywords

• waste heat
• AI computing
• high performance computing
• energy sustainability
• district energy systems

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: IMEG Corp

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