PDL Talk Series

July 24, 2025

TIME: 12:00 noon - to approximately 1:00 pm EDT
PLACE: Virtual - a zoom link will be emailed closer to the seminar

SPEAKER: Daniel S. Berger, Microsoft

Carbon Negative Datacenters Require A Marathon, Not A Sprint
Large cloud providers like Google and Microsoft promise significant carbon emission reductions over the next five years. Drawing on my experience prototyping and deploying sustainable cloud building blocks, this talk will offer a practitioner's view on our progress and the challenges ahead. While we have key wins and learnings, achieving sustainable cloud computing requires a holistic strategy since no single aspect dominates a cloud’s carbon emissions. We must tackle operational and embodied carbon across AI, general-purpose compute, storage, and networking, spanning software and hardware stacks. This talk identifies key open strategic decisions and invites the HotCarbon community to help us find the answers.

BIOS: Daniel is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Azure. His work focuses on improving the efficiency, sustainability, and reliability of cloud platforms by applying measurements, analytical models, and hardware-software prototyping to cloud server design. Daniel's recent work has received an IEEE Top Picks in 2025 and an honorable mention in 2024, an ACM ASPLOS 2023 distinguished paper award, USENIX OSDI 2023 best paper award, 2021 ACM SOSP Best Paper Award.

CONTACTS

Director, Parallel Data Lab
VOICE: (412) 268-1297

Executive Director, Parallel Data Lab
VOICE: (412) 268-5485


PDL Administrative Manager
VOICE: (412) 268-6716