"AI Computing for Future Generations, Need to Consider Energy Efficiency"

Choi Chang-gyu, Head of AI&SW Research Center at Samsung Electronics Advanced Institute of Technology
Presented 'Energy Efficiency Directions of AI Computing' at Samsung AI Forum 2021

Choi Chang-gyu, Executive Vice President and Head of AI&SW Research Center at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, is giving a presentation on the topic of "Energy Efficiency Directions in AI Computing" as a speaker in the technical session of the 'Samsung AI Forum 2021' held online on the 1st.
[Photo by Samsung Electronics YouTube]

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Heung-soon] "AI (Artificial Intelligence) computing systems face the issue of increased power consumption and carbon emissions as they process enormous amounts of data. To pass on a healthy planet to the next generation, innovative ideas prioritizing energy efficiency are essential."

Choi Chang-gyu, Executive Vice President and Head of the AI&SW Research Center at Samsung Electronics' Advanced Institute of Technology, emphasized this point during his technical session presentation titled "Directions for Energy Efficiency in AI Computing" at the 'Samsung AI Forum 2021' held online on the 1st.

Choi EVP noted, "Recently, AI technology has been applied to solve scientific challenges such as shortening drug development periods and predicting the distribution of dark matter in space to discover new planets and stars. However, these new applications inevitably cause increased power consumption and carbon emissions during the training of AI models with trillions of variables, emerging as a significant problem."

According to data presented by Choi EVP, the natural language processing model 'GPT-3' has approximately 1,750 variables, and training it once consumes 1.3 GWh (gigawatt-hours) of electricity. This amount is equivalent to the power consumed by the entire country of Korea for about one minute. The carbon emissions generated during this process equal the amount emitted by 84,000 cars in one day, and to purify this, 85 million pine trees would need to be planted.

Choi EVP stated, "Power efficiency is key to sustainable AI computing and scalability between processors and memory," adding, "Achieving this requires joint efforts from academia and industry." He then introduced Samsung Electronics' development achievements in memory and storage devices designed to address the gap between AI computing performance and memory bandwidth. A representative example is the AI memory 'HBM-PIM,' unveiled in February, which can simultaneously handle data storage and computation. This product minimizes data movement between the processor and memory and effectively utilizes the bandwidth within the memory through near-memory processing."

Now in its fifth year, the Samsung AI Forum is a platform where global experts share the latest trends and research achievements related to AI. Over two days until the 2nd, discussions cover AI research directions that can practically contribute to human life, from fundamental research to applications. In the keynote speech, Professor Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal, Canada, introduced AI algorithms applied in pure science and technology fields such as physics, chemistry, and biology, as well as molecular structure generation algorithms for discovering new materials. The following three technical sessions featured global scholars, promising AI startups, and Samsung research leaders as speakers on the themes of ▲ scalable and sustainable AI computing ▲ AI for scientific discovery ▲ and reliable computer vision.

Kim Ki-nam, Vice Chairman and CEO of Samsung Electronics, said, "While we expect AI development to provide solutions to social issues such as climate change and environmental pollution, many challenges remain. I hope this forum becomes a meaningful platform for inspiration from distinguished researchers in academia and industry and for discussions on the present and future of AI technology that benefits humanity."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.