 TheCube presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. Okay, we're back here at HPE Discover 2022. TheCube's continuous coverage is day two, Dave Vellante with John Furrier. John Friars here, he's the chief technologist for sustainable transformation at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Justin Merle, who's the director of corporate responsibility for AMD. Guys, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Thank you, it's great to be here. So, yeah, I remember the days where, you know, CIOs didn't really care about the power budget, they didn't pay the power budget, you had facilities over here, IT over here, and they didn't talk to each other, that's changed. Why is there so much discussion around sustainable IT today? It's exciting to see how much it's up-leveled, as you say. I think there are a couple different trends happening, but mainly, you know, the IT teams and IT leaders that are making decisions are seeing, to your point, how their decisions are affecting enterprise-level greenhouse gas emission reduction goals. So that connection is becoming very clear. Everything from the server processor to beyond it, those decisions have a key role, and importantly, we're seeing 60% of the Fortune 500 now have climate or energy efficiency-related goals. So, there's a perfect storm of sorts happening where more companies setting goals, IT decision makers looking particularly at the data center, because as the computational heart of an organization, it has a wealth of opportunity from an energy and emission savings perspective. I'm surprised it's only 60%. I mean, that number really shocked me, so it's got to be 100% in the next couple of years here. I would think, I mean, it's not trivial, right? You've got responsibilities in terms of reporting and you can't just mail it in, right? Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot more disclosure happening, but the goal setting is really up-leveling as well. And the metrics involved too. Can you just scope the scale and challenge of getting the right metrics, not when you have the goals? Does that factor in? What do you see there? What's your commentary on that? Yeah, I think there's, the aperture is continuing to open as metrics go, so to speak. So from an operations perspective, companies are reporting on what's referred to as scope one and scope two, and scope two is the big one from electricity, right? And then scope three is everything else. That's the supply chain and the outside of that. So a lot of implications there as well from IT decision making. Is there a business case for sustainable IT? I mean, you're probably not gonna lower the power budget, right? But is it just, hey, it's the right thing to do. We have to do it. It's good for the brand. It'll allow us to attract people. Or is there a more of a rich business case? So there really is a business case, even just with inside the data center walls, for example. There's inefficiencies that are inherent in many of these data centers. There's really low utilization levels as well. And by reducing over provisioning and increasing utilization, there's real money to be saved in terms of equipment costs, maintenance agreement costs, software licensing costs. So actually the power consumption in the environmental piece is an added benefit, but it's not the main reason. So we actually had IDC do a survey for us last year and we asked IT executives, 500 senior IT executives, were you implementing sustainable IT programs and why? My guess initially was about 40% of them would say yes, actually the number was 96% of them. And when we asked them why, they fell into three categories. The digital leaders, those that are the early adopters, moving the quickest, they said we do it to attract and retain institutional investors. They've been hearing from their boards, they've been hearing from their investor relations teams and investors are starting to ask. And even in a couple cases, board seats are becoming contentious based on the environmental perspective of the person being nominated. This digital mainstream, the folks in the middle about 80% of the total pie, they're doing it to attract and retain customers because customers are asking them about their sustainable IT programs. If they're a non-manufacturing customer, their data center consumption is probably the largest part of their company. It's also by the way, usually the most expensive real estate the company owns. So customers are asking and customers are not only asking, do you have basic programs in place? But they're asking, what are your goals to Justin's point? The customers are starting to realize that carbon goals have been vaguely defined historically. So they're asking for specificity, they're asking for transparency. And by the way, the science-based target initiative recently released their requirements for net zero science-based targets and that requires significant reduction to your point before you start considering renewable energy in that balance. So the third reason those digital followers that slowest group or folks that are in industries that move the slowest, they said they were doing this to attract and retain employees because they recognize that the data scientists, the computer science, computer engineering students that they're trying to attract want to work at a company where they can see how what they do directly contributes to purpose. And they vote with their feet if they come on and they can't make that connection pretty quickly or if they spend a lot of their time chasing down inefficiencies in a technology infrastructure, they're not going to stay there very long. I mean, the mission-driven organization is definitely an employee factor. People are interested in that. The only work for a company is responsible doing the right thing. But the business case is interesting because I think there's recognition now more than ever before. You think you're right on it. It used to be kind of like mail it in before, okay, we're doing some stuff. Now it's like we all have to do it and it's a board issue. It's a financing issue. It might be a filing issue, as you might have mentioned. So that's all great. So I got to ask how you guys specifically are working together, AMD and HPE. What are you guys doing to make it more efficient? And then I'll see with cloud and cloud scale, there's more servers being shipped now than ever before. So, and more devices at the edge. What are you guys doing together specifically? Yeah, we've been working together, AMD and HPE on advancing sustainability for many years. I've had the opportunity of working directly with John for many years and I've learned a lot from him and your team. It's fantastic to see all the developments here. I mean, so most recently the top 500 and the green 500 list of supercomputers came out. And at the top of that list is AMD HPE systems. And it shows kind of the pinnacle of what can be possible for other data centers looking to modernize and scale. So the number one system, the fastest system in the world and the most energy efficient system in the world, the frontier supercomputer has AMD HPE technology in it. And it just passed the exascale barrier. I mean, I'm still just blown away by this a billion, billion calculations per second. It's just amazing. And the research is doing around clean energy, alternative energy sources, scientific research is really exciting. So there's that. The other system that really jumps out is the LUMI system, the number three system because it's 100% powered by renewable energy. So not only that, it takes the heat and it channels it to a nearby town and covers 20% of that town's heating needs. Thereby avoiding 12,400 metric tons of carbon emissions. So this system is carbon negative, right? And you just go down the list. I mean, AMD is in the top eight out of 10 most green 500. So rewind that second. So you have the heat and the power shifting to a town? Yes. The LUMI supercomputer has the heat from the system to a nearby town. It's like a closed loop. The idea of circular economy, but with energy. And it takes that waste and it makes it an input, a resource. But this is the kind of innovation that's going on, right? This is the scale. This is where scale and efficiency kind of come together. That's huge. Where's that going to go? What's your perspective on where that goes next? Because that's a blueprint that could be replicated. You bet. So I think we're going to continue to see overall power consumption go up at the system level. But performance per watt is climbing much more dramatically. So I think that's going to continue to scale. It's going to require new cooling technology. So direct liquid cooling is becoming more and more in use and customers really interested in that. There's shifting from industry standard architectures to lower end high performance computer architectures to get direct liquid cooling, higher core processors and get the performance they want in a smaller footprint. And at the same time, they're really thinking about how do we operate the infrastructure as a system, not as individual piece parts? And one of the things that Frontier and Lumie do so well as they were designed from the start as a system, not as piece parts making up the system. So I think that happens. The other thing that's really critical is no one company is going to solve these challenges ourselves. So one of the things I love about our partnership with AMD is we look at each other sustainability goals before we launch them. We say, well, how can we help? One of AMD's goals that I'll let Justin talk about came about because HPE at the time of separation laid a really aggressive product energy efficiency goal out. Said, but we're not sure how we're going to make this and AMD said we can help. So that collaboration, we critique each other's programs, we push each other, but we work together. I like to say partnership is a leadership in this. Well, that's a nuanced point before you get to that solution there, Justin. This systems thinking is really important. You're seeing that now with cloud, some of the things the Green Lake and the systems are pointing out, this holistic systems thinking is applied to partnerships, not just the company. This is a really nuanced point, but we're seeing that more and more. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, Justin mentioned the heat reuse. It's the same way with the National Renewable Energy Lab. They actually did snow removal and building heating with the heat reuse. So if you're designing, for example, a liquid cold system from the start, how do you make it a symbiotic relationship? There's more and more interest in co-locating data centers in greenhouses in colder environments, for example, because the principle of the circular economy is nothing is waste. So if you think it's waste or you think it's a byproduct, think about how can that be an input to something else? Right, so you might put a data center so you can use ambient cooling or somewhere in the Columbia River so you can take advantage of renewable energy. What are some goals that you guys can share with us? So we've got some great momentum and a track record coming off of going back to 2014, we set a 25 by 20 goal to improve the energy efficiency for our mobile processors and mobile devices, right? So laptops. And we were able to achieve a 31.7x in that timeframe, so which was twice the industry trend to that. So it really, and then moving on, we've doubled down on data center and we've set a new goal of a 30x increase in energy efficiency for our server processors and accelerators to really focused on HPC and AI training. So that's a 30x goal over 2020 to 2025 focused on these really important workloads because they're fast growing. We heard yesterday 150 billion devices connected by 2025 generating a lot of data, right? So that's one of the reasons why we focused on that because these are demanding workloads and this represents a 2.5x increase over the historical trend, right? And fundamentally speaking, that's a 97% reduction in energy use per computation in five years. So we're very pleased. We announced an update recently. We're at 6.8x, we're on track for this goal and making great progress and showing how these solutions at a processor level and an accelerator level can be amplified, taken into HPE technology. Generally tech companies, you know, they compete, wanna rip each other's faces off. And is that the case in this space or do you guys collaborate with your competitors to share best practice? Is that beginning? Is it already there? There's much more collaboration in the space. This is one of the safe places I think where collaboration does occur more. Yeah, and we've all got to work together. A great example that was in the supply chain. When HPE first set our supply chain expectations for our suppliers around things like worker rights and environment and worker protection from a health and safety perspective. We initially had our code of conduct ask their suppliers to comply with it, started auditing them out. And we quickly got into the factories and saw they were doing it for our workloads. But if you looked around the factory, they weren't doing it other places. And we took a step back and said, well, wait a minute, why is that? And they said, that vendor doesn't require it. So we took a step back and said, let's get the industry together. We share a common supply chain. How do we have a common set of expectations and push them out to our supply chain? How to now do third party audits so the same supplier doesn't get audited by each of the major vendors and then share those audit results. And what we found was that really had a large lever effect of moving the electronic supply chain much more rapidly towards our expectations in all those areas. Well, then other industries looked and said, well, wait a minute, if that worked for electronics, it'll probably work broader. And so now the output of that is what's called the responsible business alliance across many industries taking that same approach. So that's a pre-competitive. We all have the same challenge. In many cases, we share a common supply chain. So that's a great example of electronic companies coming together, design standards for things. There's a green grid group at the moment looking at liquid cooling connects. You know, we don't want every vendor to have a different connection point for liquid cooling, for example. So how do we standardize that to make our customers have a easier time about looking at the technologies they want from any vendor and having common connection points? All right, okay, so a lot of collaboration. Last question, how much of a difference do you think it can make? In other words, what percent of the blame pie goes to information technology? And I think regardless, you got to do your part. Yeah. Will it make a dent? I think the sector has done a really good job of keeping that increase from going up while exponentially increasing performance, right? So it's been a really amazing industry effort. And moving forward, I think this is more important than ever, right? And with the slowdown of Moore's law, we're seeing more gains that need to come from process, beyond process architecture to include packaging innovations to power management, to just the architecture here. So the challenge of mitigating and minimizing energy growth is important. And we believe like with that 30X energy efficiency goal that it is doable, but it does take a lot of collaboration and focus. That's a great point. I mean, if you didn't pay attention to this, IT could really become a big piece of the pie. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. People are watching. People are watching. They're paying attention at all levels. Congratulations. Absolutely. All right, Dave Vellante for John Furrier and our guests. Don't forget to go to siliconangle.com for all the news, our YouTube channel. Well, actually go to cube.net. You'll get all these videos in our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash siliconangle. You can check out everything on demand. Keep it right there. But right back, HPE Discover 2022 from Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE.