In December 2023 the European Commission published a scheme for rating the energy efficiency of data centres, which are estimated to account for close to 3% of EU electricity demand and likely to increase in the coming years. The scheme is designed to increase transparency and to promote new designs and efficiency in data centres to reduce energy.

This will require creative solutions. Abdul Jabbar of the Insight Research Ireland Centre for Data Analytics at UCC is working on a project called GLACIATION, which harnesses AI to manage data flows more efficiently.

GLACIATION is a three year project funded by the European Union flagship research and innovation programme Horizon Europe.

The project consortium consists of 15 organisations: leaders in computer engineering, smart manufacturing, public policy, technological development, innovation management, business information system security and public administrations. The overall technical coordinator of the project is Aidan O’Mahony of Dell; a part-time PhD student in Insight.

The team is developing a platform that reduces energy consumption for data processing and analytics through AI-enforced minimal data movement operations.

The platform will allow for energy-efficient distributed flow of data from the edge to the cloud. The AI engine handles the dynamically changing flow of data for continuous training and optimisation of resources usage and workflow allocation.

Abdul Jabbar’s part in this project is the prediction of the demand of different servers or clusters within a cloud infrastructure with the help of an AI/Machine Learning framework.