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      How can we reduce the carbon footprint of global computing?

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      The voracious appetite for energy from the world’s computers and communications technology presents a clear threat for the globe’s warming climate. That was the blunt assessment from presenters in the intensive two-day Climate Implications of Computing and Communications workshop held on March 3 and 4, hosted by MIT’s Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC), MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and the Schwarzman College of Computing.

      The virtual event featured rich discussions and highlighted opportunities for collaboration among an interdisciplinary group of MIT faculty and researchers and industry leaders across multiple sectors — underscoring the power of academia and industry coming together.

      “If we continue with the existing trajectory of compute energy, by 2040, we are supposed to hit the world’s energy production capacity. The increase in compute energy and demand has been increasing at a much faster rate than the world energy production capacity increase,” said Bilge Yildiz, the Breene M. Kerr Professor in the MIT departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering, one of the workshop’s 18 presenters. This computing energy projection draws from the Semiconductor Research Corporations’s decadal report.To cite just one example: Information and communications technology already account for more than 2 percent of global energy demand, which is on a par with the aviation industries emissions from fuel.“We are the very beginning of this data-driven world. We really need to start thinking about this and act now,” said presenter Evgeni Gousev, senior director at Qualcomm.  Innovative energy-efficiency optionsTo that end, the workshop presentations explored a host of energy-efficiency options, including specialized chip design, data center architecture, better algorithms, hardware modifications, and changes in consumer behavior. Industry leaders from AMD, Ericsson, Google, IBM, iRobot, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Tertill, Texas Instruments, and Verizon outlined their companies’ energy-saving programs, while experts from across MIT provided insight into current research that could yield more efficient computing.Panel topics ranged from “Custom hardware for efficient computing” to “Hardware for new architectures” to “Algorithms for efficient computing,” among others.

      Visual representation of the conversation during the workshop session entitled “Energy Efficient Systems.”

      Image: Haley McDevitt

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      The goal, said Yildiz, is to improve energy efficiency associated with computing by more than a million-fold.“I think part of the answer of how we make computing much more sustainable has to do with specialized architectures that have very high level of utilization,” said Darío Gil, IBM senior vice president and director of research, who stressed that solutions should be as “elegant” as possible.  For example, Gil illustrated an innovative chip design that uses vertical stacking to reduce the distance data has to travel, and thus reduces energy consumption. Surprisingly, more effective use of tape — a traditional medium for primary data storage — combined with specialized hard drives (HDD), can yield a dramatic savings in carbon dioxide emissions.Gil and presenters Bill Dally, chief scientist and senior vice president of research of NVIDIA; Ahmad Bahai, CTO of Texas Instruments; and others zeroed in on storage. Gil compared data to a floating iceberg in which we can have fast access to the “hot data” of the smaller visible part while the “cold data,” the large underwater mass, represents data that tolerates higher latency. Think about digital photo storage, Gil said. “Honestly, are you really retrieving all of those photographs on a continuous basis?” Storage systems should provide an optimized mix of of HDD for hot data and tape for cold data based on data access patterns.Bahai stressed the significant energy saving gained from segmenting standby and full processing. “We need to learn how to do nothing better,” he said. Dally spoke of mimicking the way our brain wakes up from a deep sleep, “We can wake [computers] up much faster, so we don’t need to keep them running in full speed.”Several workshop presenters spoke of a focus on “sparsity,” a matrix in which most of the elements are zero, as a way to improve efficiency in neural networks. Or as Dally said, “Never put off till tomorrow, where you could put off forever,” explaining efficiency is not “getting the most information with the fewest bits. It’s doing the most with the least energy.”Holistic and multidisciplinary approaches“We need both efficient algorithms and efficient hardware, and sometimes we need to co-design both the algorithm and the hardware for efficient computing,” said Song Han, a panel moderator and assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT.Some presenters were optimistic about innovations already underway. According to Ericsson’s research, as much as 15 percent of the carbon emissions globally can be reduced through the use of existing solutions, noted Mats Pellbäck Scharp, head of sustainability at Ericsson. For example, GPUs are more efficient than CPUs for AI, and the progression from 3G to 5G networks boosts energy savings.“5G is the most energy efficient standard ever,” said Scharp. “We can build 5G without increasing energy consumption.”Companies such as Google are optimizing energy use at their data centers through improved design, technology, and renewable energy. “Five of our data centers around the globe are operating near or above 90 percent carbon-free energy,” said Jeff Dean, Google’s senior fellow and senior vice president of Google Research.Yet, pointing to the possible slowdown in the doubling of transistors in an integrated circuit — or Moore’s Law — “We need new approaches to meet this compute demand,” said Sam Naffziger, AMD senior vice president, corporate fellow, and product technology architect. Naffziger spoke of addressing performance “overkill.” For example, “we’re finding in the gaming and machine learning space we can make use of lower-precision math to deliver an image that looks just as good with 16-bit computations as with 32-bit computations, and instead of legacy 32b math to train AI networks, we can use lower-energy 8b or 16b computations.”

      Visual representation of the conversation during the workshop session entitled “Wireless, networked, and distributed systems.”

      Image: Haley McDevitt

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      Other presenters singled out compute at the edge as a prime energy hog.“We also have to change the devices that are put in our customers’ hands,” said Heidi Hemmer, senior vice president of engineering at Verizon. As we think about how we use energy, it is common to jump to data centers — but it really starts at the device itself, and the energy that the devices use. Then, we can think about home web routers, distributed networks, the data centers, and the hubs. “The devices are actually the least energy-efficient out of that,” concluded Hemmer.Some presenters had different perspectives. Several called for developing dedicated silicon chipsets for efficiency. However, panel moderator Muriel Medard, the Cecil H. Green Professor in EECS, described research at MIT, Boston University, and Maynooth University on the GRAND (Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding) chip, saying, “rather than having obsolescence of chips as the new codes come in and in different standards, you can use one chip for all codes.”Whatever the chip or new algorithm, Helen Greiner, CEO of Tertill (a weeding robot) and co-founder of iRobot, emphasized that to get products to market, “We have to learn to go away from wanting to get the absolute latest and greatest, the most advanced processor that usually is more expensive.” She added, “I like to say robot demos are a dime a dozen, but robot products are very infrequent.”Greiner emphasized consumers can play a role in pushing for more energy-efficient products — just as drivers began to demand electric cars.Dean also sees an environmental role for the end user.“We have enabled our cloud customers to select which cloud region they want to run their computation in, and they can decide how important it is that they have a low carbon footprint,” he said, also citing other interfaces that might allow consumers to decide which air flights are more efficient or what impact installing a solar panel on their home would have.However, Scharp said, “Prolonging the life of your smartphone or tablet is really the best climate action you can do if you want to reduce your digital carbon footprint.”Facing increasing demandsDespite their optimism, the presenters acknowledged the world faces increasing compute demand from machine learning, AI, gaming, and especially, blockchain. Panel moderator Vivienne Sze, associate professor in EECS, noted the conundrum.“We can do a great job in making computing and communication really efficient. But there is this tendency that once things are very efficient, people use more of it, and this might result in an overall increase in the usage of these technologies, which will then increase our overall carbon footprint,” Sze said.Presenters saw great potential in academic/industry partnerships, particularly from research efforts on the academic side. “By combining these two forces together, you can really amplify the impact,” concluded Gousev.Presenters at the Climate Implications of Computing and Communications workshop also included: Joel Emer, professor of the practice in EECS at MIT; David Perreault, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of EECS at MIT; Jesús del Alamo, MIT Donner Professor and professor of electrical engineering in EECS at MIT; Heike Riel, IBM Fellow and head science and technology at IBM; and Takashi Ando, principal research staff member at IBM Research. The recorded workshop sessions are available on YouTube. More

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      Building communities, founding a startup with people in mind

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      MIT postdoc Francesco Benedetti admits he wasn’t always a star student. But the people he met along his educational journey inspired him to strive, which led him to conduct research at MIT, launch a startup, and even lead the team that won the 2021 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. Now he is determined to make sure his company, Osmoses, succeeds in boosting the energy efficiency of traditional and renewable natural gas processing, hydrogen production, and carbon capture — thus helping to address climate change.

      “I can’t be grateful enough to MIT for bringing together a community of people who want to change the world,” Benedetti says. “Now we have a technology that can solve one of the big problems of our society.”

      Benedetti and his team have developed an innovative way to separate molecules using a membrane fine enough to extract impurities such as carbon dioxide or hydrogen sulfide from raw natural gas to obtain higher-quality fuel, fulfilling a crucial need in the energy industry. “Natural gas now provides about 40 percent of the energy used to power homes and industry in the United States,” Benedetti says. Using his team’s technology to upgrade natural gas more efficiently could reduce emissions of greenhouse gases while saving enough energy to power the equivalent of 7 million additional U.S. homes for a year, he adds.

      The MIT community

      Benedetti first came to MIT in 2017 as a visiting student from the University of Bologna in Italy, where he was working on membranes for gas separation for his PhD in chemical engineering. Having completed a master’s thesis on water desalination at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, he connected with UT alumnus Zachary P. Smith, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, and the two discovered they shared a vision. “We found ourselves very much aligned on the need for new technology in industry to lower the energy consumption of separating components,” Benedetti says.

      Although Benedetti had always been interested in making a positive impact on the world, particularly the environment, he says it was his university studies that first sparked his interest in more efficient separation technologies. “When you study chemical engineering, you understand hundreds of ways the field can have a positive impact in the world. But we learn very early that 15 percent of the world’s energy is wasted because of inefficient chemical separation — because we still rely on centuries-old technology,” he says. Most separation processes still use heat or toxic solvents to separate components, he explains.

      Still, Benedetti says, his main drive comes from the joy of working with terrific mentors and colleagues. “It’s the people I’ve met that really inspired me to tackle the biggest challenges and find that intrinsic motivation,” he says.

      To help build his community at MIT and provide support for international students, Benedetti co-founded the MIT Visiting Student Association (VISTA) in September 2017. By February 2018, the organization had hundreds of members and official Institute recognition. In May 2018, the group won two Institute awards, including the Golden Beaver Award for enhancing the campus environment. “VISTA gave me a sense of belonging; I loved it,” Benedetti says.

      Membrane technology

      Benedetti also published two papers on membrane research during his stint as a visiting student at MIT, so he was delighted to return in 2019 for postdoctoral work through the MIT Energy Initiative, where he was a 2019-20 ExxonMobil-MIT Energy Fellow. “I came back because the research was extremely exciting, but also because I got extremely passionate about the energy I found on campus and with the people,” he says.

      Returning to MIT enabled Benedetti to continue his work with Smith and Holden Lai, both of whom helped co-found Osmoses. Lai, a recent Stanford PhD in chemistry who was also a visiting student at MIT in 2018, is now the chief technology officer at Osmoses. Co-founder Katherine Mizrahi Rodriguez ’17, an MIT PhD candidate, joined the team more recently.

      Together, the Osmoses team has developed polymer membranes with microporosities capable of filtering gases by separating out molecules that differ by as little as a fraction of an angstrom — a unit of length equal to one hundred-millionth of a centimeter. “We can get up to five times higher selectivity than commercially available technology for methane upgrading, and this has been observed operating the membranes in industrially relevant environments,” Benedetti says.

      Today, methane upgrading — removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from raw natural gas to obtain a higher-grade fuel — is often accomplished using amine absorption, a process that uses toxic solvents to capture CO2 and burns methane to fuel the regeneration of those solvents for reuse. Using Osmoses’ filters would eliminate the need for such solvents while reducing CO2 emissions by up to 16 million metric tons per year in the United States alone, Benedetti says.

      The technology has a wide range of applications — in oxygen and nitrogen generation, hydrogen purification, and carbon capture, for example — but Osmoses plans to start with the $5 billion market for natural gas upgrading because the need to bring innovation and sustainability to that space is urgent, says Benedetti, who received guidance in bringing technology to market from MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation. The Osmoses team has also received support from the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund Program.

      The next step for the startup is to build an industrial-scale prototype, and Benedetti says the company got a huge boost toward that goal in May when it won the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, a student-run contest that has launched more than 160 companies since it began in 1990. Ninety teams began the competition by pitching their startup ideas; 20 received mentorship and development funding; then eight finalists presented business plans to compete for the $100,000 prize. “Because of this, we’re getting a lot of interest from venture capital firms, investors, companies, corporate funds, et cetera, that want to partner with us or to use our product,” he says. In June, the Osmoses team received a two-year Activate Fellowship, which will support moving its research to market; in October, it won the Northeast Regional and Carbon Sequestration Prizes at the Cleantech Open Accelerator; and in November, the team closed a $3 million pre-seed round of financing.

      FAIL!

      Naturally, Benedetti hopes Osmoses is on the path to success, but he wants everyone to know that there is no shame in failures that come from best efforts. He admits it took him three years longer than usual to finish his undergraduate and master’s degrees, and he says, “I have experienced the pressure you feel when society judges you like a book by its cover and how much a lack of inspired leaders and a supportive environment can kill creativity and the will to try.”

      That’s why in 2018 he, along with other MIT students and VISTA members, started FAIL!–Inspiring Resilience, an organization that provides a platform for sharing unfiltered stories and the lessons leaders have gleaned from failure. “We wanted to help de-stigmatize failure, appreciate vulnerabilities, and inspire humble leadership, eventually creating better communities,” Benedetti says. “If we can make failures, big and small, less intimidating and all-consuming, individuals with great potential will be more willing to take risks, think outside the box, and try things that may push new boundaries. In this way, more breakthrough discoveries are likely to follow, without compromising anyone’s mental health.”

      Benedetti says he will strive to create a supportive culture at Osmoses, because people are central to success. “What drives me every day is the people. I would have no story without the people around me,” he says. “The moment you lose touch with people, you lose the opportunity to create something special.”

      This article appears in the Autumn 2021 issue of Energy Futures, the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative. More

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      Chemistry Undergraduate Teaching Lab hibernates fume hoods, drastically reducing energy costs

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      The Department of Chemistry’s state-of-the-art Undergraduate Teaching Lab (UGTL), which opened on the fifth floor of MIT.nano in fall 2018, is home to 69 fume hoods. The hoods, ranging from four to seven feet wide, protect students and staff from potential exposure to hazardous materials while working in the lab. Fume hoods represent a tremendous energy consumption on the MIT campus; in addition to the energy required to operate them, the air that replaces what is exhausted must be heated or cooled. Thus, any lab with a large number of fume hoods is destined to be faced with high operational energy cost.

      “When the UGTL’s fume hoods are in use, the air-change rates — the number of times fresh air is exchanged in the space in a given time frame — averages between 25 and 30 air changes per hour (ACH),” says Nicole Imbergamo, senior sustainability project manager in MIT Campus Construction. “When the lab is unoccupied, that air-change rate averages 11 ACH. For context, in a laboratory with a single fume hood, typically MIT’s EHS [Environment, Health, and Safety] department would require six ACH when occupied and four ACH when unoccupied. Hibernation of the fume hoods allowed us to close the gap between the current unoccupied air-change rate and what is typical on campus in a non-teaching lab environment.”

      Fifty-eight of the 69 fume hoods in the UGTL are consistently unused between the hours of 6:30 p.m. and 12 p.m., as well as all weekend long, totaling 135 hours per week. Based on these numbers, the team determined it was safe to “hibernate” the fume hoods during the off hours, saving the Institute on fan energy and the cost of heating and cooling the air that gets flushed into each hood.

      John Dolhun PhD ’73 is the director of the UGTL. “The project started when MIT Green Labs — a division of the Environment, Health, and Safety Office now known as the Safe & Sustainable Labs Program — contacted the UGTL in October 2018, followed by an initial meeting in November 2018 with all the key players, including Safe and Sustainable Labs, the EHS Office, the Department of Facilities, and the Department of Chemistry,” says Dolhun. “It was during these initial discussions that the UGTL recognized this was something we had to do. The project was completed in April 2021.”

      Now, through a scheduled time clock in the Building Management System (BMS), the 58 fume hoods are flipped into hibernation mode at the end of each day. “In hibernation mode, the exhaust air valves go to their minimum airflow, which is lower than a fume hood minimum required when in use,” says Imbergamo. “As a safety feature, if the sash of a fume hood is opened while it is in standby mode, the valve and hood are automatically released from hibernation until the next scheduled time.” The BMS allows Dolhun and all with access to instantly view the hibernation status of every hood online, at any time, from any location. As an additional safety measure, the lab is equipped with an emergency kill switch that, when activated, instantly takes all 58 fume hoods out of hibernation, increasing the air changes per hour by about 37 percent, at one touch.

      The MIT operations team worked with the building controls vendor to create graphics that allow the UGTL users to easily see the hood sash positions and their current status as either hibernated or in normal operating mode. This virtual visibility allows the UGTL team to confirm the hoods are all closed before leaving the lab at the end of each day, and to confirm the energy reductions. This visual access also lends itself to educating the students on the importance of closing the sash at the end of their lab work, and gives an opportunity for educating the students on relevant fume hood management best practices that will serve them far beyond their undergraduate chemistry classes.

      Since employing the use of hibernation mode, the unoccupied UGTL air change rate has plummeted from 11 ACH to seven ACH, drastically shrinking unnecessary energy outflow, saving MIT an estimated $21,000 per year. The annual utility cost savings of both reduced supply and exhaust fan energy, as well as the heating and cooling required of the supply air to the space, will result in a less-than three-year payback for MIT. The overall success of the hood hibernation program, and the savings that it has afforded the UGTL, is very motivational for the Green Initiative. The highlights of this system will be shared with other labs, both at MIT and beyond, that may also benefit from similar adjustments. More

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      Cleaning up industrial filtration

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      If you wanted to get pasta out of a pot of water, would you boil off the water, or use a strainer? While home cooks would choose the strainer, many industries continue to use energy-intensive thermal methods of separating out liquids. In some cases, that’s because it’s difficult to make a filtration system for chemical separation, which requires pores small enough to separate atoms.

      In other cases, membranes exist to separate liquids, but they are made of fragile polymers, which can break down or gum up in industrial use.

      Via Separations, a startup that emerged from MIT in 2017, has set out to address these challenges with a membrane that is cost-effective and robust. Made of graphene oxide (a “cousin” of pencil lead), the membrane can reduce the amount of energy used in industrial separations by 90 percent, according to Shreya Dave PhD ’16, company co-founder and CEO.

      This is valuable because separation processes account for about 22 percent of all in-plant energy use in the United States, according to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. By making such processes significantly more efficient, Via Separations plans to both save energy and address the significant emissions produced by thermal processes. “Our goal is eliminating 500 megatons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2050,” Dave says.

      Play video

      What do our passions for pasta and decarbonizing the Earth have in common? MIT alumna Shreya Dave PhD ’16 explains how she and her team at Via Separations are building the equivalent of a pasta strainer to separate chemical compounds for industry.

      Via Separations began piloting its technology this year at a U.S. paper company and expects to deploy a full commercial system there in the spring of 2022. “Our vision is to help manufacturers slow carbon dioxide emissions next year,” Dave says.

      MITEI Seed Grant

      The story of Via Separations begins in 2012, when the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) awarded a Seed Fund grant to Professor Jeffrey Grossman, who is now the Morton and Claire Goulder and Family Professor in Environmental Systems and head of MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Grossman was pursuing research into nanoporous membranes for water desalination. “We thought we could bring down the cost of desalination and improve access to clean water,” says Dave, who worked on the project as a graduate student in Grossman’s lab.

      There, she teamed up with Brent Keller PhD ’16, another Grossman graduate student and a 2016-17 ExxonMobil-MIT Energy Fellow, who was developing lab experiments to fabricate and test new materials. “We were early comrades in figuring out how to debug experiments or fix equipment,” says Keller, Via Separations’ co-founder and chief technology officer. “We were fast friends who spent a lot of time talking about science over burritos.”

      Dave went on to write her doctoral thesis on using graphene oxide for water desalination, but that turned out to be the wrong application of the technology from a business perspective, she says. “The cost of desalination doesn’t lie in the membrane materials,” she explains.

      So, after Dave and Keller graduated from MIT in 2016, they spent a lot of time talking to customers to learn more about the needs and opportunities for their new separation technology. This research led them to target the paper industry, because the environmental benefits of improving paper processing are enormous, Dave says. “The paper industry is particularly exciting because separation processes just in that industry account for more than 2 percent of U.S. energy consumption,” she says. “It’s a very concentrated, high-energy-use industry.”

      Most paper today is made by breaking down the chemical bonds in wood to create wood pulp, the primary ingredient of paper. This process generates a byproduct called black liquor, a toxic solution that was once simply dumped into waterways. To clean up this process, paper mills turned to boiling off the water from black liquor and recovering both water and chemicals for reuse in the pulping process. (Today, the most valuable way to use the liquor is as biomass feedstock to generate energy.) Via Separations plans to accomplish this same separation work by filtering black liquor through its graphene oxide membrane.

      “The advantage of graphene oxide is that it’s very robust,” Dave says. “It’s got carbon double bonds that hold together in a lot of environments, including at different pH levels and temperatures that are typically unfriendly to materials.”

      Such properties should also make the company’s membranes attractive to other industries that use membrane separation, Keller says, because today’s polymer membranes have drawbacks. “For most of the things we make — from plastics to paper and gasoline — those polymers will swell or react or degrade,” he says.

      Graphene oxide is significantly more durable, and Via Separations can customize the pores in the material to suit each industry’s application. “That’s our secret sauce,” Dave says, “modulating pore size while retaining robustness to operate in challenging environments.”

      “We’re building a catalog of products to serve different applications,” Keller says, noting that the next target market could be the food and beverage industry. “In that industry, instead of separating different corrosive paper chemicals from water, we’re trying to separate particular sugars and food ingredients from other things.”

      Future target customers include pharmaceutical companies, oil refineries, and semiconductor manufacturers, or even carbon capture businesses.

      Scaling up

      Dave, Keller, and Grossman launched Via Separations in 2017 — with a lot of help from MIT. After the seed grant, in 2015, the founders received a year of funding and support from the J-WAFS Solutions program to explore markets and to develop their business plans. The company’s first capital investment came from The Engine, a venture firm founded by MIT to support “tough tech” companies (tech businesses with transformative potential but long and challenging paths to success). They also received advice and support from MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, Venture Mentoring Service, and Technology Licensing Office. In addition, Grossman continues to serve the company as chief scientist.

      “We were incredibly fortunate to be starting a company in the MIT entrepreneurial ecosystem,” Keller says, noting that The Engine support alone “probably shaved years off our progress.”

      Already, Via Separations has grown to employ 17 people, while significantly scaling up its product. “Our customers are producing thousands of gallons per minute,” Keller explains. “To process that much liquid, we need huge areas of membrane.”

      Via Separations’ manufacturing process, which is now capable of making more than 10,000 square feet of membrane in one production run, is a key competitive advantage, Dave says. The company rolls 300-400 square feet of membrane into a module, and modules can be combined as needed to increase filtration capacity.

      The goal, Dave says, is to contribute to a more sustainable world by making an environmentally beneficial product that makes good business sense. “What we do is make manufacturing things more energy-efficient,” she says. “We allow a paper mill or chemical facility to make more product using less energy and with lower costs. So, there is a bottom-line benefit that’s significant on an industrial scale.”

      Keller says he shares Dave’s goal of building a more sustainable future. “Climate change and energy are central challenges of our time,” he says. “Working on something that has a chance to make a meaningful impact on something so important to everyone is really fulfilling.”

      This article appears in the Spring 2021 issue of Energy Futures, the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative.  More