Power of electronics and peoples will
have you taken a photo lately
maybe you took it a few minutes ago
maybe earlier today
or yesterday maybe you have uploaded
into a social media platform
maybe facebook well little did you know
where it is actually stored
physically stored it’ll be in a place
like this
in clooney ireland or
in lulia sweden which are the two main
data centers
of facebook here in europe
what are data centers well
there are these warehouses very big
warehouses
with electronic racks row up and row
and they store all our data they are the
most powerful
industry now where information is the
most
valuable thing
and what is the energy consumption of
these data centers
of storing our data processing our data
and we gonna have even more abundance of
data
in the presence or in the upcoming of 5g
communication
what is 5g well it’s beyond 3 and 4g
in 3g i would communicate with you with
a via a machine or an electronic device
in 5g machines will communicate with
machines
everything will be connected it will be
this web
of communication everything will be
smart
smart city smart building smart health
care
smart everything and there is more data
that will be
in abundance a tsunami of data
where is all these data going to be
stored
what is the power or the energy of this
data
and what we can do with all these data
how we can process this data
now let’s look a little bit of data use
over the last year
and also the impact of covid
we have up to 70 percent of more mobile
phone users or smartphone users
everything is growing even in terms of
laptops
computers streaming we all like netflix
i guess
it’s an amazing an abundance of
frightening even
amount of data that we are consuming but
also generating
look at this snapshot here what’s
happening every 60 seconds on the
internet
there are hundreds and thousands of zoom
meetings netflix streams
instagrams tweets and by the time i
finish this talk
would be hundreds of millions of dollars
used on the internet
alarming it’s just the beginning
now we reached in 2017 1.1
zettabytes of data use
this is unprecedented by
2022 there will be 4.2 zettabytes if you
didn’t know what a zettabyte is
it has 21 zeros behind it
now internet it’s bigger in terms of
energy consumption
than a country like japan or or even
switzerland
now we’ll see even more of that
look into the projections here and what
the studies show
by 2030 the electronic industry
will be consuming 21 of the electricity
so that means one-fifth of the earth’s
global power
it will be on our electronic devices and
powering data centers
in terms of copper emission that’s about
14
making it globally the most polluting
and power hungry industry
it’s not going to be aviation it’s not
going to be our cars
it’s going to be our electronics things
we use
day to day now these are frightening
alarming bringing awareness maybe you
name it
but they are there now look a little bit
about their lifetime
at best maybe we use three to five years
our devices 18 percent of electronic
waste
is recycled 18. 82
end up in landfill in mountains of
electronics
now look a little bit of this chart here
showing what has happened to the
electronic waste and which countries
produced the most of course china is up
there
united states japan some european
countries
look into the far right kilogram per
capita
well friends is actually up there on top
five contenders
we don’t recycle much we like to use
them we don’t recycle much
so the electronic industry is really
revolutionizing our lives the way we
work
the way we entertain where we live how
communicate one another
but what’s the impact of all this
industry in our environment
why do electronics consume so much power
can we do something about it well that
has been my quest
i have a phd in computer engineering
from uc santa barbara and my phd was
how we can actually optimize or reduce
the power of microprocessors
which is the building block of an
electronic system
even my after my phd i felt like there
is
so much to do into how we can actually
reduce the power of electronic system
i felt i was just at the start of it so
i moved from u.s
to france i joined cnrs
and together with my team i kept on
looking at this problem is
can we build energy efficient
electronics
where is the power consumption going
can we do better and we strip down the
problem we looked at it at the system
level
architectural level circuit all the way
to transistor and even the materials
they are made of
we found out that there are some
materials such
as carbon nanotubes here
and 2d materials that indeed have
excellent physical properties they
switch faster
and their also are ultra low power and
they are very compact they are atomic
thin
so we can do amazing things with them
and we are currently exploring to build
a technology
in this materials but still
we need to go beyond the way we
classically compute
so in physics there is a theoretical
limit about how you
how much energy you need to compute or
to even compare
between two physical states like a zero
and a one
but our classical machines are way
beyond this computing limit
so we needed to figure out we need to
find a better way we need to think
how we design or how the computing is
done
and the inspiration came from nature
more specifically from the brain
now look at this little image here you
can see that neurons are firing with
neurons in a web of connected via
synapses
this is how we actually learn how we
memorize
this is how our brain builds plasticity
as we grow
our new connections between neurons to
neurons via this synapses
and the brain is a very powerful
computing
machine if you want to call it that way
it consumes about
20 to 25 watts which is less than
a lamp and it’s very efficient in
computing a lot of tasks
so can we design electronic system in a
similar way
like the brain or what we call it brain
inspired
design so i am part of a community
that is looking into ultra low power
brain inspired electronics so one side
you have the biological neuron and
synapses
and on the other side you have the
electronic neurons and synapses that we
are developing
using these nanomaterials in order to
emulate
the biological neural networks for
example like these circles here
connected with other circles
like neurons connecting with other
neurons via synapses to build this
web of connectivity things that you can
compute
much faster and consuming variable
trello power
that can be deployed in your next
electronics
this will change this would be a
paradigm change on how we actually
compute and how the electronics would
look like
and this is also in the framework of a
european project that i’m actually
working with many academics and industry
from industry
as well to bring this technology so it’s
deployed
so we make a change in terms of energy
efficiency
and power consumption of our electronic
devices
so we as scientists feel like this is a
turning point
we need to make the technology
environmental friendly we not
we cannot keep on going like nothing
matters
this is an this is an important point
for us a turning point for a whole
community
and i’m happy to hear from the state of
the union from european commission
the statement that made that we need to
reduce the comm the emissions by 55
percent by 2030.
now that doesn’t sound like much but
it’s a big step
toward changing the way that we
are actually using our data and also the
data centers and the emission
that they bring into our environment
so it’ll take actors like us scientists
technologists academia
policy makers but also you as the end
user we need a cultural
shift toward this digital sobriety
so i will leave you with four main
suggestions there are many of them but
these are simple
enough for you to apply if you were to
buy
next time an electronic system please
look into the specs and choose one with
the least
amount of power
and please use them longer and recycle
them properly
refurbish reformat them if you have to
but use them longer and really don’t
just throw them on the trash you can
take them into a recycling center
and about your computers in your
institutions
you know at night you can turn it off
you think they are in power mode in
sleep mode and they are in ultra low
power mode but no
in a large scale they are consuming a
lot of power when you’re not
using just turn it off
and the last one is to use these
collaborative shared platforms
versus email so if i were to send an
email to
n people with an attachment that would
be copied
n times in the data center for each
person i send it to
rather than creating a lot of these
copies unnecessarily just use one link
one shared thing
that everybody can refer to now that
would make a difference there are
institutions
or people that write you know hundreds
of emails and it institutional level
there can be
thousands of emails and 60
text emails with no attachment is about
one kilometer of car driving in terms of
emission
so how many kilometers are you driving a
day that you didn’t even know about
just by your emails
things like this make a difference in
terms of the data
the power also their emission
and also how we use our electronics so
we are all actors into this
and we all can make an impact and the
change
is really for all of us for scientists
for us end users
and for our governments and policy
makers
so please take play your part and take
this
also seriously thank you