4 Use Cases For Data Center Digital Twins And More On AI Simulations

Technical projects often require pinpointed analysis – detailed observation of what’s working in a particular field, and why it matters.

One of the most controversial aspects of AI has these kinds of technical details happening around it – that’s the idea that these new technologies will be energy-intensive, and we need to look at the energy equations around data center operations.

More Data Center Building

We’re going to have more data centers – as AI takes over nearly every aspect of business and personal life, there’s going to be a vast need for computing power, and by proxy, a big need for the energy needed to run the systems.

How are we going to optimize and keep things in top shape?

One way is with digital twinning, a process that can show analysts what’s likely to happen with any given system.

I found this resource from IEEE that shows some key ways that the digital twinning of data centers can help with design.

Energy optimization – stakeholders can use these digital twins to look at energy consumption and cooling, to cut down on wasted energy and make these systems more efficient.

Thermal management – the systems can look at the spatial distribution of temperature, and model airflows and other aspects of temperature management. That in turn can help with cooling as well.

Disaster recovery – the digital twins can help forecast what a system would suffer in a natural disaster or other emergency. Then engineers can make changes and improve durability of the systems in question.

Security optimization – the systems can also be contained for better security to withstand hacks and efforts by bad actors to compromise a data center.

There are a number of additional points, but these are some good examples of how this type of digital twinning can work. The IEEE is an important voice, too, in the world of AI.

A Digital Twin of the World

In climate science, we can use digital twins to model weather outcomes. That’s going to help us deal with the effects of climate change as they happen.

Specifically, Nvidia‘s Earth-2 platform uses AI and simulations to visualize weather and predict its impact on the world.

This is a description from Nvidia’s site:

“The Earth-2 accelerated systems will let climate scientists produce kilometer (km)-scale climate simulations, conduct large-scale AI training and inference, and achieve low-latency interactivity. NVIDIA Modulus integrates support for numerous neural network models for climate and weather simulation…. NVIDIA Omniverse enables ultra-large-scale, high-fidelity, interactive visualizations that depict weather conditions across the globe. Omniverse Nucleus includes a data federation engine that offers transparent data access across external databases and live feeds.”

So that’s another way that digital twins are contributing to the effort to battle climate change.

Building a Conversation

At a recent panel at Davos in January, we had Mike Pritchard, director of simulation research at Nvidia, and Dejan Milojijic of the IEEE, as well as two other panelists Natasha Zarine of EcoSattva and Carlo Ratti, professor of urban technologies and planning at MIT.

These professionals talked about how to manage systems, and both Pritchard and Milojijic mentioned digital twinning as a major strategic technique.

Quotes from the Talk:

“We do use tech and AI in our systems. We’ve developed an app that helps us monitor what we’re doing, and it is very useful. However, I’m here to also say that what we’ve learned is that tech and AI is not a magic bullet.” – Natasha Zarine

“I believe that we’re on the verge of a fundamentally more useful simulation technology to better understand our future, not only because it allows us to admit physics we did not think were possible to simulate on the scale of the planet for hundreds of years, but also because once trained, AI is interactive.” – Mike Pritchard

“What we’ve been working is to bring them together, because either of them cannot survive anymore on their own.” – Dejan Milojijic, of “power and energy systems”

“We’ve been looking at mitigation for a long time, but for mitigation, architecture can play a big role, and also needs many other disciplines, and many other industries.” – Carlo Ratti

Answering Questions

So when people ask you: “how we will control the energy footprint of the systems?,” one way is with this type of in-depth modeling of data centers design and operation.

And when people ask, “how are we going to deal with the effects of climate change?,” one way is by using digital twining to try to predict what’s going to happen in our communities, and around the world.

I thought that was important enough to highlight here as we move into the new year and do our best to make sure that we’re using these systems to improve our world.