Dr. Serkan Girgin
Dr. Serkan Girgin has established and is currently leading the activities of the Center of Expertise in Big Geodata (CRIB) at Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, which is an overarching facility collecting, developing, and sharing operational know-how on the geospatial big data technologies. He performs research on big data, cloud computing, and research data management technologies, and provides advice and consultancy on adoption of these technologies for education, research, and capacity development activities. He is also an expert on the design and development of geocomputing platforms, GIS and RS applications, environmental information systems, and large-scale web applications. He has designed and developed ITC's Geospatial Computing Platform, and European Commission's Natech Database (eNatech) and Rapid Natech Risk Assessment and Mapping System (RAPID-N). He has more than two decades of research and consultancy experience in academic, private, and scientific organizations. He is an eScience Center Fellow and 2022 SURF Research Support Champion in the Netherlands.
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)