Mission 10-X: a holistic, collaborative approach towards more energy-efficient computing

One of the paramount societal challenges of our time is the climate crisis, caused by our excessive energy-consumption. While Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can provide solutions to make diverse applications more energy-efficient, it also consumes more and more energy itself. This is at odds with world-wide goals for the reduction of greenhouse gases. It has been estimated that ICT already uses 5-10% of the world's electricity production. With ongoing automation and the advent of new ICT applications, such as Artificial Intelligence and Internet-of-Things, the energy consumption is rapidly increasing to unsustainable levels, with predictions going up to a 20% share by 2030, if no game-changing technologies are introduced. 

The ICT energy consumption also hinders the development of useful applications. As an example, advanced sensors are being developed, with widespread applications in e.g. transportation, health monitoring, industrial processes and agriculture. The interpretation of these data requires powerful algorithms, for example in the form of neural network models that embody artificial intelligence. Operating such neural networks requires enormous numbers of data operations, especially large scale matrix-vector multiplications. However, the energy required for this hampers to execute these operations on the site ('the edge'), and necessitates sending data to a centralized computing system ('the cloud'). This long-distance data transfer is very dissipative and causes delays that are problematic in low-latency operations. It further requires connectivity to the cloud, with related security and privacy-protection issues

Solutions to these challenges require a holistic approach along the complete "computing stack", from basic materials and device concepts to software and application-specific aspects and societal issues. Several large scale, multidisciplinary consortia are being formed to work together in such a holistic approach, like the NWA program NL-ECO and the Mission 10-x platform, which Prof. Dr. Hans Hilgenkamp will introduce in his talk.