Energy & CivilizationStudent Project Showcase: Fall 2022

Group Members

Luke Elam, Tanner Nel, Vince Han

Problem Identification Video

Project Report

Executive Summary

With the rise of the internet and rapid advancement of technology, the power of data has grown exponentially as nearly 5 billion people use the internet worldwide. With this extensive increase in internet traffic, a complex and powerful infrastructure is responsible for accommodating the day to day needs of billions of people across the globe. Effectively all of global internet traffic travels through data centers, and most of data heavy computations (artificial intelligence, blockchain, etc) also occur in data centers. These data centers require an extensive amount of electricity to remain operational at all times throughout the day. With the internet and data expanding seemingly indefinitely, what implications may this have on the amount of electricity required to power these complex data centers? This paper will focus on the current and projected trends in operational data centers as well as suggest multifaceted approaches to reducing the amount of electricity consumed by data centers. With an extensive increase in the demand for data centers across the globe, there must be a course of action for firms and data center operators to address their energy consumption in order to limit the potentially dangerous increase in emissions.

Final Paper: Improving the Energy Efficiency of Data Centers