UC Santa Barbara researches into data center efficiency, donating by Facebook
A new partnership of UC Santa Barbara’s Institute for Energy Efficiency (IEE) and Facebook will accelerate research into energy-efficient data centers and artificial intelligence (AI).
Facebook will provide a three-year, $1.5 million grant in support of UC Santa Barbara’s Institute for Energy Efficiency (IEE) pioneering research. Through this partnership, IEE will investigate advanced energy-efficient data center infrastructure, including low-power optical interconnects for computer networks and machine learning (ML) with a reduced carbon footprint.
Improving efficiencies for data centers
Facebook has committed to reaching net-zero emissions across its value chain in 2030. The company aims to bring energy efficiency to the next level.
Rod Alferness, dean of the College of Engineering, said,
Rod Alferness, Dean, College of Engineering
”We are deeply grateful to Facebook for their generosity and support of the university and the Institute for Energy Efficiency. This gift will drive collaborative discoveries of potentially world-changing solutions to substantially reduce the energy required to drive vital next-generation data centers and applications of machine learning.”
Facebook will also help developing research projects and provide IEE researchers with insight from their prior experiences designing and operating data centers. The tech leader currently has eight operational data center sites in the U.S., with five more sites that have been announced but have not yet begun operating.
With the partnership powering its research endeavors, IEE expects to make significant headway on two of its grand challenges: achieving multiple orders-of-magnitude improvements in the efficiency of both data center and AI/ML workloads.
