Time and Location: 6:00PM, Thursday 23rd November - Mott Lecture Theatre
Title: 'Why the Internet is bad for the Global Warming and how Quantum Physics can help save the planet'
Lecturer: Dr Gavin Burnell (University of Leeds)
Abstract:
The modern internet, with large data centres supporting widespread services such as Google, YouTube, Amazon and Facebook consume an ever-greater proportion of the global electricity supply. This situation has been exacerbated by the recent rise of large scale consumer AI service such as ChatGPT which place a huge reliance of power hungry GPU processing. Although western economies are decarbonising their electricity generation, a significant fraction of the power used by internet services are not carbon neutral.
In this talk I will discuss what Physics can tell us about the fundamental limits of energy efficiency for data storage and manipulation. Modern Physics offers a plethora of routes to getting closer to these fundamental limits. Here, I will discuss in particular how we might use superconductors running at liquid He temperatures to improve on the efficiency of current computing systems and indicate where the boundaries of current research lie.
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