Tag Archive

“AI for Green IT”, greenwashing ou révolution?

Posted on June 29, 2024 by Renaud Pawlak

Il est de notoriété publique que l’IA est une technologie énergivore, et il est usuel de penser que l’IA n’est pas compatible avec l’éco-conception des logiciels.

Mais évidemment, comme attendu, rien n’est aussi binaire qu’il n’y paraît.

D’abord, il va sans dire que la technologie est récente et va être améliorée, optimisée, voire révolutionnée dans les prochaines années (de la même manière que la blockchain a vu sa consommation énergétique drastiquement diminuer au fil des générations successives). On peut par exemple noter cette approche consistant à réinventer le hardware pour qu’il soit intrinsèquement conçu pour l’apprentissage automatique. Ou encore de nombreuses approches visant à améliorer la phase d’entraînement des modèles (par exemple l’approche JEST). Evidemment, certains diront que cela n’en fait pas un bon argument pour l’éco-conception, du fait de l’effet rebond, et ils auront bien raison de le souligner.

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MC2: a tool to remotely monitor computer resources

Posted on June 11, 2021 by Renaud Pawlak

For more than a year now, EASYTEAM and Cinchéo have been working on a project that aims at creating new methods and tools to help IT departments to control the carbon footprint linked to digital services. It is a vast and complicated topic and a lot needs to be achieved. With MC2 (say M-C-square), we are contributing a small and modest part to the tooling ecosystem.

In this post, I will explain the principles of MC2 and how it works. The source code is fully available on Github: https://github.com/cincheo/mc2.

NOTE: MC2 it is still work in progress and is a small part of a wider R&D project involving EASYTEAM (Constellation group) and INRIA (Spirals team).

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Back to the Future: let’s stop buying new Laptops and Smartphones ;)

Posted on December 21, 2020 by Renaud Pawlak

When I was a teenager, I used to go to the center of Paris to buy specific parts to build my PC myself: sound cards, video cards, power blocks, hard drive, CPU, fans, memory, you name it. Not only it was fun and instructive, but it was also good for the planet.

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AI vs. Maths

Posted on November 25, 2020 by Renaud Pawlak

Quite recently, I had the chance to discuss with Philippe de Reffye, a French researcher who spent his life studying how plants grow. He built a generic mathematical model that can simulate the growth of any plant, assuming we can mesure some environmental parameters to calibrate the model. He wrote a very complete book about it (in French).

The book of Philippe de Reffye

The interesting point from my perspective is that his work managed to lower the computational complexity of simulating plant growth from an exponential to a linear function. What would take days to calculate can now be done in seconds, and it grows linear w.r.t. the plant complexity.

Philippe and I talked about AI. His opinion is that AI can help calibrating the models. However, without the maths, you cannot really understands what happens when the plants grow and you have no chance finding an optimization of the kind he found.

Philippe warned me about the danger of replacing maths with ML when we don’t have a model. Indeed, it is a potential workaround, but it is expensive in computation time and it blurs our understanding of the world.

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