Sagar Dolas
Sagar Dolas is a member of the Innovation Labs at SURF, where he leads and manages various programs and initiatives focused on Future Infrastructure and Applications, Advanced Computing, and Networking. In recent years, he has concentrated on energy as a design principle for the future of computing. He has led projects to integrate energy management tools with the Dutch supercomputer Snellius. Sagar has a background in High-Performance Computing (HPC), computational engineering, and applied mathematics, having completed his graduate-level studies at TU Delft and FAU Erlangen before joining SURF.
Session
Energy efficiency in computing becomes more and more important as climate change impacts intensify, energy costs increase, and efforts to reach the Sustainable Development Goals to tackle environmental, social and economic issues gain momentum. This is especially true for large-scale computing for research, including cloud computing, which underpin advancements and breakthroughs in many scientific domains. Achieving significant improvements in energy efficiency for such resource-intensive computing tasks, especially artificial intelligence methods including machine learning, deep learning and the new generation of large language models, is a complex challenge that requires a coordinated effort across hardware and software domains, as well as a large group of actors including infrastructure providers, system administrators, software developers, and researchers. Despite the rapid pace of technological development, many existing tools and platforms still lack essential features, such as detailed energy consumption metrics and granular task-level monitoring capabilities. Optimization of research computing workflows considering energy efficiency is also mostly overlooked. This panel discussion seeks to unite a diverse array of experts from the Netherlands, and potentially from the international community, to shed light on the current practices and challenges of energy-efficient computing, with a special focus on research. We aim to explore how energy efficiency is currently addressed within advanced computing, identify critical gaps, and discuss actionable steps to enhance collaboration and drive forward more energy-efficient practices. By fostering this exchange of ideas and experiences of different actors, we hope to contribute to the development of computing infrastructures and workflows that are not only powerful but also environmentally sustainable.
Panelists:
- Prof. Dr. Rob van Nieuwpoort (Leiden University)
- Gilles Tourpe (Amazon Web Services)
- Gijs van den Oord (Netherlands eScience Centre)
- Sagar Dolas (SURF)
- Adhitya Adhitya Bhawiyuga (University of Twente)