The Swiss Datacenter Efficiency Association, or SDEA, is a pioneering non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing sustainability in data centre operations.
Its mission is to bring transparency to how data centres consume energy and use its resources efficiently. Through this, SDEA helps data centres ensure their operations are sustainable and optimised – which is particularly important, given the rate of global digital transformation and how much energy this inevitably consumes.
As AI and 5G technologies continue to drive increasing data centre demands, SDEA’s work is becoming increasingly critical. The organisation’s President, Babak Falsafi, sat down exclusively with Data Centre Magazine to share how SDEA provides tools to measure and maximise energy efficiency across a data centre’s IT stack.
He shares how tools like the SDEA Navigator help operators improve their energy efficiency and encourage greater transparency across a data centre.
Please introduce yourself and your role at SDEA.
I hold a PhD in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and have worked on multiprocessor architecture, memory systems and server networking since 1990.
I began my career at Purdue and later became a full professor at Carnegie Mellon in 2008. That same year, I joined EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland) and founded EcoCloud, a research center pioneering post-Moore data centre technologies, including algorithms, cooling and power distribution.
Our team includes project manager Matthias Haymoz, who coordinates the association’s activities and volunteers, including founding board members from academia and industry, along with technical experts dedicated to sustainable data centre operations.