IBM Research is accelerating discoveries to tackle climate change
Reflecting on the significance of Earth Day in 2022, it is becoming very clear that only an approach rooted in deep science will enable us to tackle the long list of challenges posed by the changing climate.
Of course, there’s a lot in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report to inspire feelings of despondency – that humanity has backed itself into a global climate crisis corner. Yet, as IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee states in the opening of the report: “We have the tools and know-how required to limit warming.”
To this end, IBM Research and our partners worldwide are enhancing and applying the latest in Artificial Intelligence (AI), hybrid cloud and other emerging technologies to The world is changing rapidly every day, and the way we used to solve problems won’t cut it anymore. At IBM Research, we’re combining our expertise in quantum computing, AI, and hybrid cloud to drastically increase how quickly we can discover solutions to tackle today’s most urgent problems. Read more about the Accelerated Discovery team’s work.accelerate the discovery of solutions that can mitigate climate change and help the world adapt to increasingly severe climate conditions. Our goals are to create more energy-efficient computer hardware and software, make infrastructure more resilient to extreme climate events and protect the riches of the planet, both biological and man-made, with the help of geospatial analytics.
The development of more powerful, yet highly energy efficient, hardware and software serves two important purposes. First, these systems are the engines to help accelerate the scientific discovery required to develop timely climate solutions such as discovering new materials that can be used for carbon sequestration. Second, more energy-efficient IT systems help keep data centers themselves from contributing to the problem.
The total growth in energy consumption for computing out-paces the growth in global energy production. Factors that are contributing to this growth rate include an explosion in the amount of information data centers must process, store and transfer, as well as the emergence of energy intensive AI workloads.
“We must take a holistic and systematic approach to reduce the carbon footprint associated with computing systems” said IBM Fellow Tamar Eilam.
“In today’s data centers, we can reduce the overhead of cooling and power distribution; we can maximize the use of renewable energy for computing by coupling workload and grid dynamicity; and we must work on new innovative digital accelerators for specialized workloads, and even entirely new computational models that drastically reduces energy such as Analog AI. In addition, we ought to also address the embodied server emissions through innovations in materials and processes.”
To reduce AI hardware’s impact on the environment IBM Research is developing AI chips that rely on reduced precision to cut the energy consumption while maintaining model accuracy. This includes AI accelerator chips built with 7nm technology that we are making available at our The IBM Research AI Hardware Center is a global research hub headquartered in Albany, New York. The center is focused on enabling next-generation chips and systems that support the tremendous processing power and unprecedented speed that AI requires to realize its full potential. Learn more.AI Hardware Center in Albany, NY. These chips incorporate ultra-low precision hybrid 8-bit floating point number (FP8) formats for deep-learning models.
Recently, IBM Research also demonstrated an approach for energy efficiency using low voltage DNN accelerators. While low voltage is desired for energy efficiency, an undesired outcome is that it can cause bit-flipping in the SRAM.
