Fifteen-year-old Calgary student Anie Udofia has placed at this year’s World of 8 Billion International Student Video Contest.
Udofia was one of 5,000 students to enter the competition, but her project examining methods to cool down AI data centres set her apart from the crowd. As part of her research, the teen realized the popular evaporative technique for cooling down the facilities could be improved.
“I realized all that water is being wasted because of this specific strategy that they are using which is evaporative cooling,” Anie says, “And that there are other ways that we get to mitigate this through immersive cooling that I did more research about.”
Udofia added that she was shocked to learn some data centres use 5 million gallons of water a day to cool servers. Her solution is to move to a liquid immersion technique, submerging servers in non-conductive fluid and eliminating water waste.
“I had already been exploring ways in which AI can be used,” Anie says, “but I also wanted to explore the negatives and how it affects the environment and also the energy sector, as well.”
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Udofia researched, shot and edited her one-minute video project herself. Her cooling theory video earned her an honourable mention at the competition and a $300 prize.
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Richard Zhao, an AI expert from the University of Calgary’s computer science department, weighed in on what current cooldown methods are used for data centres.
“There’s recycling water centres where they essentially take the water and then they try to cool the data center, recycle the water so they can use it again,” he says. “Another way to cool a data centre is using running water.”
Zhao also mentioned that the difference in size of data centres requires different cooling techniques.
1) The largest data centers use 500,000 gallons per day not 5,000,000
2) Using the North Saskatchewan River as an example, that river has an average daily flow of 5,000,000,000 (5 billion) gallons per day. So that is 0.01% of the water in the river
3) The water is evaporated, not destroyed, the water ends up as atmospheric moisture falling as rain later on.
And the techno stupidity continues. Large capacity cooling systems use a closed loop system. The only place where water is directly used is for humidification.
But what else can be expected from people that believe complex software programing is some sort of artificial intelligence.
Oh well, it could get worse. The confused ones could start calling it magic. Lol