Prof. Babak Falsafi presented a Keynote speech at the inaugural HotInfra conference on June 18th, 2023, in Orlando, Florida:
Datacenters are the pillars of a digital economy and modern-day global IT services. The building blocks for today's datacenters are cost-effective volume servers that find their roots in the basic hardware and OS organization of the desktops of 90s with a fundamental mismatch with datacenter workloads and services.
Meanwhile, there are many technological trends (e.g., slowdown in Moore's Law), application trends (e.g., rapid adoption of AI) and societal challenges (e.g., climate impact of computing) that dictate innovation in datacenter design from algorithms to housing infrastructure.
Post-Moore datacenters are hot because of both their trajectory to consume (and dissipate) unprecedented levels of energy and the many hot research avenues to pursue for an infrastructure whose building blocks belong to the 90s.
