Amirreza shares the revolutionary technology that is being researched in the ECO-Qube project, the main challenges of their work package, as well as the cost-benefit analysis tool that is being developed.

LTU joined ECO-Qube to support the academic side of the project and collaborate with other partners during the development of artificial intelligence-based coding strategies for data centers. Learn more in our interview with LTU’s Amirreza Zaman.

You can watch the whole interview here, or you can read the transcript below.

Transcript of the interview

Mo 0:03
Good afternoon and welcome to our next interview in the ECO-Qube project interview series. I'm joined here by Amirreza Zaman from LTU. Amirreza, why don't you give us a brief introduction as to who you are, and why you joined the ECO-Qube project.

Amirreza 0:20
Hello, I'm Amirreza Zaman. I'm a PhD researcher at LTU and in the automatic control group. We joined the ECO-Qube project to support the academic side of the project and collaborate with other partners during developing the artificial intelligence based coding strategies for data centers. This project is very broad and interesting for us to apply this obtained machine learning methods in research and academia and also implement it in reality. So I'm here for your questions.

Mo 0:57
Excellent. First question, what is your role in the ECO-Qube project?

Amirreza 1:06
Well, I want to tell you the role of LTU, but maybe we can see it as a more emphasized subject, why we are attracted to LTU. As a summary, I can say to you that LTU has almost 25 years of research work in the application of the processing industry, energy and data centers. And so, the outcomes of our research at LTU have become innovations and productions in industry. And since ECO-Qube is one of the state-of-the-art energy usage improving projects for data centers, using artificial intelligence methods, we are very interested to develop machine learning methods in research with the applications in energy management systems and data centers. And also we have some similar projects going for LTU such as Horizon 2020, OPTi, Cloudberry, Flexi-Sync, and Arrowhead tools, and so on. So, in conclusion, it looks very interesting and we are highly motivated to contribute to this research project. If I want to be more focused LTU has joined the project as work package five. The role of LTU or the responsibility of work package five is to provide two deliverables: One of them is from the implementation side perspective of the ECO-Qube project, which will ease the implementation of the ECO-Qube project for third parties and customers. And, the second one is to provide some cost benefit analysis [CBA] guidelines and tools in order to assess the ECO-Qube project in terms of economics and social properties.

Mo 3:04
Understood. What are the revolutionary technologies that are being researched in the ECO-Qube project? The ones that you're involved in.

Amirreza 3:22
In line with innovations that we are going to have in the ECO-Qube project, we can also categorize novel methods presented in ECO-Qube in various sections. Such as, for example, including artificial intelligence based computational fluid dynamics — CFD analysis, simulation and modeling, which is a very interesting subject. And it's going to be used for the first time in data center modeling. Also smart zonal heat management systems, artificial intelligence based workload, and the placement of edge data centers. All of them can be revolutionary. So the revolutionary effects of ECO-Qube will be increasing the utilization performance and improving the common defined KPIs which we have in any parts of the projects regarding data centers. And also we can have other KPIs defined in our project to be more specific and more accurate with the performance of the ECO-Qube project such as energy usage factor, renewable energy factor, PUE, and so on.

Mo 4:32
Excellent. And what are the main challenges that you've faced in your work package?

Amirreza 4:38
If I want to talk about the challenges for work package five in ECO-Qube,, maybe it would be complicated to answer these questions at this moment because the project is running only for one year. But we started our work package five meetings, and we are not having any delays. But if we want to encounter some data collection issues, maybe in the future from the other partners in assessing the sites in providing our cost benefit analysis tool, then maybe we may face some delays in providing the final versions of the CBA tool that we are going to disseminate. Another challenge maybe would be satisfying the project's target group expectations from the implementation and cost benefit assessment aspects in our guidelines. But right now, we are good.

Mo 5:33
That's good to notice. There are no major challenges yet. What are the major objectives of work package five?

Amirreza 5:42
As I mentioned before, in work package five we are going to implement some deliverables and guidelines regarding the implementation of the ECO-Qube project in real life, which is going to be very useful for engineers, architects, and so on. And also, the next one would be providing some cost benefit analysis tools to assess the effectiveness of the ECO-Qube project and of the cooling performance analysis of data centers, with the approach of the ECO-Qube project. And then the next interesting subject that we are going to do in work package five would be assessing those provided cost benefit analysis tools on our pilot sites and see the results and compare them with other previously done projects for data centers, such as for example, Catalyst.

Mo 6:52
Excellent, so you're basically taking the research and making it actionable by industry. What progress has been made so far, specifically, in what package five?

Amirreza 7:07
We are positive on the project development right now. And we expect to deliver interesting results from the ECO-Qube project to customers. Currently, from the work package five perspective, we are working on developing the first work package five deliverable, the 5.1, which is publishing guidelines from the project's implementation purposes for architects and engineers, led by SDIA.

Mo 7:35
Excellent. I wonder if you can talk to us a little bit more about the cost benefit analysis tool? Or is it too early to talk about that?

Amirreza 7:46
I think it might be early to talk about this cost benefit analysis tool, but if I want to talk about it, we can analyze the data centers performance in many various areas regarding analyzing the cost of the data center from implementation, effects of the data centers performance on the environment, or for the customer incentives. We can define various subjects in our cost benefit analysis tool. And we try to analyze one by one, for each kind of data center that might be interested in our projec,t to implement our approach. I mean, small data centers and big data centers. But, totally the whole cost benefit analysis tool that we are going to publish sits around the benefit of applying ECO-Qube project on costs, which could be for example, power costs, costs and effects of this ECO-Qube project on the environment, what kinds of customers are we going to have, or what are the expectations? And so on.

Mo 9:12
Perfect, and maybe we can go back to the deliverable 5.1, which is implementation guidelines for edge data centers. Why is this document necessary? Why is it needed?

Amirreza 9:27
In the first task of work package five, we tried to analyze and assess the guidelines for efficient implementation of data centers. If we don't know how to implement the provided approach in ECO-Qube correctly, then we are not going to have the exact results from the ECO-Qube project or better results from the previous approach that the customers have done on their data centers. So it's really useful to provide some guidelines to have a correct design concept for architects and engineers and make this approach easier for them to implement it on their pilot sites and data centers. And making it for building owners, straightforward how to implement this on their buildings. And also, another point of this physical implementation would be that also developers can integrate this to data centers, to other sites, other pilots, by consulting with engineers and managers.

Mo 10:54
So it really facilitates the implementation between a lot of the actors within the industry, between the contractors, consultants, the building owners, and so on.

Amirreza 11:07
Yeah, of course. And also, these guidelines will enable heat valorization as well as renewable energy integration and therefore making productive data centers in terms of functionality.

Mo 11:25
So, it's still relatively early in the project. We're about a year into the three-year project. When will your deliverable be finalized?

Amirreza 11:37
The final version of the deliverable 5.1 will be online in month 36, so in the third year. But this month we will have the deliverable 5.2, which is providing the guidelines for CBA tool, so cost benefit analysis, and also assessing the project. We still have time, but the first version of the deliverable 5.1 will be available, I think in four or five months, and then we can consult the deliverable structure with other partners and try to integrate it into the final version.

Mo 12:22
Excellent. So, when we do the next round of interviews in 12 months’ time, you'll have a lot more information to share. Okay, the last question is an open question. Is there anything else that you'd like to share about the project?

Amirreza 12:38
Well, until now, I'm really enjoying working in the ECO-Qube project and I would really be interested to see the interesting results in the coming months.

Mo 12:52
Excellent. Thank you, Amirreza. That was Amirreza Zaman from LPU on the ECO-Qube project, specifically work package five. Thank you for joining us.

Amirreza 13:04
You're welcome. Have a good day.