A Water Efficiency Dataset for African Data Centers

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Shumba, Noah, Tshekiso, Opelo, Li, Pengfei, Fanti, Giulia, Ren, Shaolei
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Shumba, Noah
Tshekiso, Opelo
Li, Pengfei
Fanti, Giulia
Ren, Shaolei
author_facet Shumba, Noah
Tshekiso, Opelo
Li, Pengfei
Fanti, Giulia
Ren, Shaolei
contents AI computing and data centers consume a large amount of freshwater, both directly for cooling and indirectly for electricity generation. While most attention has been paid to developed countries such as the U.S., this paper presents the first-of-its-kind dataset that combines nation-level weather and electricity generation data to estimate water usage efficiency for data centers in 41 African countries across five different climate regions. We also use our dataset to evaluate and estimate the water consumption of inference on two large language models (i.e., Llama-3-70B and GPT-4) in 11 selected African countries. Our findings show that writing a 10-page report using Llama-3-70B could consume about \textbf{0.7 liters} of water, while the water consumption by GPT-4 for the same task may go up to about 60 liters. For writing a medium-length email of 120-200 words, Llama-3-70B and GPT-4 could consume about \textbf{0.13 liters} and 3 liters of water, respectively. Interestingly, given the same AI model, 8 out of the 11 selected African countries consume less water than the global average, mainly because of lower water intensities for electricity generation. However, water consumption can be substantially higher in some African countries with a steppe climate than the U.S. and global averages, prompting more attention when deploying AI computing in these countries. Our dataset is publicly available on \href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/masterlion/WaterEfficientDatasetForAfricanCountries/tree/main}{Hugging Face}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_03716
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Water Efficiency Dataset for African Data Centers
Shumba, Noah
Tshekiso, Opelo
Li, Pengfei
Fanti, Giulia
Ren, Shaolei
Machine Learning
Computers and Society
AI computing and data centers consume a large amount of freshwater, both directly for cooling and indirectly for electricity generation. While most attention has been paid to developed countries such as the U.S., this paper presents the first-of-its-kind dataset that combines nation-level weather and electricity generation data to estimate water usage efficiency for data centers in 41 African countries across five different climate regions. We also use our dataset to evaluate and estimate the water consumption of inference on two large language models (i.e., Llama-3-70B and GPT-4) in 11 selected African countries. Our findings show that writing a 10-page report using Llama-3-70B could consume about \textbf{0.7 liters} of water, while the water consumption by GPT-4 for the same task may go up to about 60 liters. For writing a medium-length email of 120-200 words, Llama-3-70B and GPT-4 could consume about \textbf{0.13 liters} and 3 liters of water, respectively. Interestingly, given the same AI model, 8 out of the 11 selected African countries consume less water than the global average, mainly because of lower water intensities for electricity generation. However, water consumption can be substantially higher in some African countries with a steppe climate than the U.S. and global averages, prompting more attention when deploying AI computing in these countries. Our dataset is publicly available on \href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/masterlion/WaterEfficientDatasetForAfricanCountries/tree/main}{Hugging Face}.
title A Water Efficiency Dataset for African Data Centers
topic Machine Learning
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.03716