Travel Grant: The Compute/Energy Nexus Workshop

Computing and energy have always been interwoven. Large-scale energy systems were some of the earliest adopters of advanced computing systems. The earliest large-scale computers were intensive energy consumers. However, computing and energy are now colliding in ways unseen. Historically, networking, computing hardware, and software advancements limited the growth of data centers, AI, and high-performance supercomputing. Today, increasingly the energy and electricity grid infrastructure are limiting their growth. Leadership in AI, in particular, is necessary for national strategic imperatives. Energy challenges must be addressed for continued growth of AI. The Compute/Energy Nexus Workshop is proposed by a team at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and collaborators as an invitation-based two-day event to assemble a wide range of stakeholders, articulate key challenges, and start an action plan. The workshop aims to organize a group to prepare a national strategic roadmap for integrated solutions to the challenges. The workshop will propose immediate actions and near-term tactical programs to address key issues. The roadmap group is to be organized among cross-cutting stakeholder groups, charging them to initiate activities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.