CLOUD COMPUTING SEMINAR SERIES
Title: Towards Sustainable AI: Optimizing Energy and Carbon Footprints in Large-Scale LLM Workloads
Speaker: Shashikant Ilager, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Date & Time : January 07, 2026 (Wednesday), 14:30
Venue: CDS 102 Seminar Hall
ABSTRACT
Contemporary large-scale computing systems are becoming increasingly heterogeneous, complex, and decentralized, driven by the growing demand for digitization. This transformation is most evident in the rapid rise of Generative AI applications, which have fueled the expansion of hyperscale data centers, now often referred to as AI factories. While these infrastructures enable unprecedented computational capabilities, they also impose high environmental costs by contributing heavily to global energy consumption and carbon emissions. Assessing and managing resource and energy use in such distributed systems is a complex challenge. It requires addressing the heterogeneity of hardware platforms and their diverse power characteristics, the wide range of user workloads and software stacks, and the risk of performance degradation when energy-saving measures are applied. In this talk, I will present our recent research on data-driven modeling and optimization techniques for energy-aware management of large-scale computing systems. In particular, I will discuss how Large Language Model (LLM)-based applications can be fine-tuned through hardware and software co-design strategies to balance performance with sustainability objectives.
BIOGRAPHY
Shashikant Ilager is an Assistant Professor at the Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam (UvA), where he is a member of the Multiscale Networked Systems Research Group. Before joining the UvA, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the High Performance Computing group at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Austria. He was a visiting researcher at INRIA, IMT Atlantique in 2023, and at IBM Research, Yorktown Heights, USA, in 2024. He completed his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering at the CLOUDS Lab, University of Melbourne (UniMelb), Australia, in 2021. He is currently the coordinator of the European Horizon project GreenDIIGT, leading a consortium of 15 European research institutes and organizations that are developing policies, tools, and innovative solutions for green research infrastructures. His research lies at the intersection of distributed systems, energy efficiency, and machine learning. He focuses on performance engineering, data-driven optimization for energy efficiency, and sustainable AI. His teaching and research have been recognized with several awards, including the Excellence in Teaching Award at UniMelb in 2018, the IEEE TCCLD Outstanding PhD Thesis Award in 2021, and Best Paper Awards at CCGRID 2020 and UCC 2023. Please visit his homepage for more details: https://shashikantilager.com/
Host Faculty: Prof. Yogesh Simmhan
ABOUT: The IBM-IISc Hybrid Cloud Lab (IIHCL) hosted at IISc is curating the Cloud Computing Seminar series with guest speakers from Industry and Academia speaking about the latest technologies and research on Cloud and edge computing, distributed computing systems, and AI/ML/Big Data platforms.
ALL ARE WELCOME
