Research connecting computing, power and thermal management

The rapid growth of AI workloads is substantially increasing data center electricity demand and carbon emissions, motivating the development of carbon-aware scheduling methods. However, effective scheduling is challenging because renewable generation and AI workloads are subject to forecast errors, while training and inference workloads exhibit heterogeneity in computational characteristics. This paper proposes a contextual robust optimization framework for AI data center operation. The proposed model explicitly captures the heterogeneous computational characteristics of AI training and inference workloads. To deal with renewable generation and workload forecast errors, we develop loss-based uncertainty learning models that directly map contextual features to covariate-dependent uncertainty sets. The resulting contextual joint chance-constrained scheduling problem is reformulated into a tractable robust optimization problem, and a calibration algorithm is developed to provide finite-sample probabilistic feasibility guarantees for multiple joint chance constraints. Numerical experiments based on real-world AI workload traces and renewable generation data show that the proposed method reduces operating costs by an average of 5.57% compared to benchmark methods while maintaining reliable feasibility and strong computational scalability.

The rapid growth of large-scale AI workloads, particularly Large Language Model (LLM) training and inference, is fundamentally reshaping the operational dynamics of hyperscale data centers. Unlike traditional cloud workloads, AI-driven jobs exhibit bursty, high-intensity, and rapidly shifting resource demands, often leading to sudden capacity stress that cannot be effectively handled by reactive threshold-based mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a deployment-oriented, burst-aware early warning framework for proactive capacity stress prediction under AI workload surges. We formulate the problem as a high-recall forecasting task over multivariate telemetry windows, with the explicit goal of enabling operational intervention before system degradation occurs. The proposed framework integrates workload intensity, temporal variation, and system pressure signals, and employs a lightweight tree-based learning model to capture nonlinear interactions in highly imbalanced environments. To evaluate the system under realistic conditions, we introduce an AI workload surge injection methodology that simulates burst-driven demand patterns observed in large-scale AI systems. Our XGBoost-based model achieves an ROC AUC of 0.697 and an AP of 0.670, significantly outperforming baseline methods. Under deployment-oriented threshold selection, the framework achieves a Recall of 0.914, enabling the detection of the majority of stress-prone periods with acceptable false-alarm cost. Beyond predictive performance, we show how the proposed framework can be integrated into operational control loops to support proactive actions such as workload throttling and resource scaling. Our results highlight the practical value of high-recall, learning-based early warning systems in enabling resilient and adaptive data center operations in the era of AI-driven workloads.

Liquid cooled supercomputers dissipate tens of megawatts of waste heat through cooling plants organized as parallel subloops that serve coolant distribution units. The number of subloops and the assignment of units to them are design decisions fixed at construction, yet they have not been systematically optimized for facilities at this scale. As electricity grids decarbonize, embodied carbon becomes a larger share of facility life cycle emissions and the cost of an unnecessary subloop becomes harder to justify. We present a framework that integrates operational energy from a validated control optimizer based on sequential least squares programming, embodied carbon from a bill of materials, and expected unplanned downtime from a per subloop reliability model. The framework is applied to the Frontier supercomputer, evaluating all 611 ways of partitioning its 25 coolant distribution units into two through six subloops. The life cycle cost and carbon optimum is found at two subloops holding 14 and 11 units, achieving 3,320.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent and $3.99 million over a seven year horizon, a saving of 50.2 tonnes and $100,000 compared to built four subloop configuration. The optimum remains on the Pareto front in all 15 scenarios of a one at a time sensitivity sweep. A semi-analytical decision rule generalizes the result, predicting four subloops for Aurora, two for El Capitan, and one for LUMI. When reliability is treated as a hard constraint set by operations policy, the four subloop Frontier deployment is consistent with the constrained optimum.

The rapid growth in compute demand from artificial intelligence (AI) has driven a massive surge in data center construction, precipitating an energy and sustainability crisis. Motivated by the abundant solar energy in outer space and the recent sharp reduction in space launch costs, orbital data centers are emerging as a potential pathway for the future scaling of AI compute infrastructure. While the cold background in vacuum seems appealing for cooling, computing systems operating in space without convection ultimately rely on radiative cooling, requiring large-area radiators. Such limitations in thermal management pose a significant challenge for deploying the standard liquid/air-cooled computers in space. In this work, we investigate the impact of the thermal constraints in space on both graphics processing units (GPUs) with high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and the emerging compute-in-memory (CIM) accelerators. We develop a radiator-in-the-loop co-design methodology that directly links the permitted system TOPS (terra-operations per second) with the practical radiator cooling capacity in space. Our thermal simulations reveal that the separately located GPU die and HBMs create severe thermal hotspots under limited radiator capacity, necessitating GPU thermal throttling. In contrast, CIM accelerators exhibit a much more uniform heat distribution and consistently outperform GPUs in TOPS/W across a wide range of radiator budgets. We systematically evaluated the performance of CIM and GPU across various AI workloads and demonstrated that CIM has a magnified advantage for deployment in space under realistic thermal constraints.

The deployment of artificial intelligence is increasingly constrained by limited site-level power capacity, which must support both compute systems and non-compute systems (primarily cooling) at all times. Cooling power demand, especially in non-evaporative cooling systems, can increase substantially with ambient temperature in the summer, producing recurring periods of elevated cooling power that often lasts for multiple hours per day. Therefore, maximizing compute capacity under a limited site-level power budget is an important planning and operational challenge. Sizing the compute system conservatively based on peak cooling power can leave part of the site-level power capacity underutilized when the cooling power is below its peak, particularly in cooler months. On the other hand, sizing the compute system aggressively based on low cooling power can cause the total site-level power demand to exceed the site-level power capacity during hot days in the summer. This paper proposes ComputeAmp (Compute Amplifier), a framework that maximizes the compute capacity by jointly and dynamically leveraging cooling, battery energy storage, and computing-based adaptation. We discuss the opportunities and limitations of ComputeAmp and illustrate its potential to significantly expand usable compute capacity within local power and water resource limits. We also present a problem formulation for ComputeAmp and highlight a few algorithmic and operational challenges.

The rapid growth of large language model (LLM) inference is creating significant data-center loads that face increasing energy-management challenges under tightening grid conditions and demand response (DR) requirements. Conventional data-center energy management mainly relies on temporal and spatial workload shifting and campus-level energy asset scheduling, but it usually treats LLM inference demand as an aggregate load. As a result, these approaches fail to exploit the internal characteristics of LLM serving and therefore overlook the flexibility offered by LLM-specific techniques such as model quantization. To unlock this flexibility, this paper proposes a quantization-enabled energy management framework for grid-responsive LLM inference data centers. First, a quantization-to-power model is established to map each model--quantization configuration to a compact set of dispatchable parameters. Second, a two-stage quantization-enabled DR model is developed to account for model instance switching, request routing, and precision selection. Third, a multi-campus co-optimization method is introduced for DR participation by integrating grid-side electricity and carbon signals with the quantization-enabled DR model. Case studies show that the proposed framework reduces total data-center operating cost by 34.3\% without curtailing served token volume, validating model quantization as an effective flexibility lever for grid-responsive LLM data-center energy management.

With the increasing demand for edge computing and AI

Energy-intensive data centers (DCs) have emerged as substantial and flexible loads in modern power systems, underscoring the critical need for computation-electricity coordination. Harnessing the spatio-temporal flexibility of DC workloads is a promising approach to facilitate this coordination. However, existing studies overlook the collaborative potential of computational resource sharing among geo-distributed DCs, thereby failing to fully unlock this flexibility. In this paper, a bi-level computation-electricity coordination framework is proposed to explicitly capture the bidirectional interactions between DCs and power grid. Firstly, a peer-to-peer cloud service market (P2P-CSM) for geo-distributed DCs is proposed, which enables bilateral cloud service transactions to leverage regional heterogeneities (e.g., electricity prices, cooling efficiency). Secondly, locational marginal prices are embedded into the framework to reflect network congestion and nodal price disparities. Thirdly, a dual consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-based decentralized algorithm is developed as the P2P market clearing algorithm, and a bisection-assisted iterative algorithm is proposed to ensure rigorous convergence of the framework. Case studies conducted on modified IEEE 30-bus system validate that the P2P-CSM achieves a win-win computation-electricity coordination: it not only increases total DC operational profit by 22.8\%, but also effectively alleviates grid congestion and yields a 3.2\% reduction in total energy consumption.