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Data Center Bust & Boom

"One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other, "My little computer said such a funny thing this morning" - Alan Turing

Data centers in colleges and universities are crucial for supporting the extensive technological infrastructure required for modern education and research. These centers house critical servers and storage systems that manage vast amounts of data, ensuring reliable access to academic resources, administrative applications, and communication networks. They enable the secure storage and processing of sensitive information, including student records, faculty research, and institutional data.

Uptime Institute Tier Classification

Moreover, data centers facilitate advanced research by providing the computational power needed for data-intensive studies in fields like bioinformatics, climate science, and artificial intelligence. They support virtual learning environments and online course management systems, essential for the increasingly prevalent hybrid and online education models. Efficient data centers also contribute to campus sustainability goals by optimizing energy use through modern, eco-friendly technologies.

ANSI/TIA 942 Data Center Infrastructure Standard

Additionally, robust data center infrastructure enhances the university’s ability to attract top-tier faculty and students by demonstrating a commitment to cutting-edge technology and resources. They also play a vital role in disaster recovery and business continuity, ensuring that educational and administrative functions can resume quickly after disruptions. Overall, data centers are integral to the academic mission, operational efficiency, and strategic growth of colleges and universities.

Standards distinguish meaningful patterns from imagined ones.

We have followed development of the technical standards that govern the success of these “installations” since 1993; sometimes nudging technical committees — NFPA, IEEE, ASHRAE, BICSI and UL.   The topic is vast and runs fast so today we will review, and perhaps respond to, the public consultations that are posted on a near-daily basis.  Use the login credentials at the upper right of our home page.

Related:

Oakland University examining feasibility of hosting data center on campus

University of Virginia — Fontaine Research Data Center

Ernst & Young LLP: Why there is no silver bullet for data center financing

Data Center Growth

Gallery: Supercomputers & Data Centers

Data Center Wiring

Datacenter Architecture

Power Management For Data Centers Challenges And Opportunities

Data Center Operations & Maintenance

Inauguration of New Supercomputer

Big Data Applications in Edge-Cloud Systems

Supercomputer Tour

Data Center Metrics

“What Happens When Data Centers Come to Town”

What Happens When Data Centers Come to Town

Terry Nguyen | BA Public Policy

Ben Green |Assistant Professor, School of Information and Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy

Partner | Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition

Introduction. [Abstract].  The rapid growth of data centers, with their enormous energy and water demands, necessitates targeted policy interventions to mitigate environmental impacts and protect local communities. To address these issues, states with existing data center tax breaks should adopt sustainable growth policies for data centers, mandating energy audits, strict performance standards, and renewable energy integration, while also requiring transparency in energy usage reporting. “Renewable energy additionality” clauses should ensure data centers contribute to new renewable capacity rather than relying on existing resources.  If these measures prove insufficient, states should consider repealing tax breaks to slow unsustainable data center growth. States without tax breaks should avoid such incentives altogether while simultaneously implementing mandatory reporting requirements to hold data centers accountable for their environmental impact. Broader measures should include protecting local tax revenues for schools, regulating utility rate hikes to prevent cost-shifting to consumers, and aligning data center energy demands with state climate goals to avoid prolonging reliance on fossil fuels.

Related:

Sharan Kalwani (Chair, Southeast Michigan Section IEEE): AI and Data Center Demand

Gallery: Other Ways of Knowing Climate Change

 

Application of Big Data in Power System Reform

 

Application of Big Data in Power System Reform

Abstract:  Power grid operation and maintenance decision-making reform is an important part of power system reform. With the construction of massive historical quasi real-time data management platform, the reform of power system is also advancing. However, in the face of massive data explosion, the business level and business logic become disorganized and redundant. Based on the actual situation of Shenzhen Power Supply Bureau, the sg-erp data center is composed of structured data center, massive data center, unstructured data center and power grid GIS data center. With the unprecedented growth of business application data, the data center can improve business logic and promote power system reform. The experimental results show that big data technology has a broad application prospect in the reform of power industry.

CLICK HERE for complete paper

Smart Grid Blockchains

Power Management For Data Centers Challenges And Opportunities

Gallery: Supercomputers & Data Centers

Pytorch | TensorFlow | JAX

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print(“Python”)

 

Tokens

Standards Michigan: Language*

American English is effectively the de facto reference language for most modern LLM tokenization.   During today’s session we explore the at-present advantage Americans have in the development of artificial applications — whether it should always be that way or not.  Tokenization isn’t language-neutral — it’s heavily skewed toward English due to data realities. This is one of the core reasons why “English-first” prompting often works best in today’s LLMs.

We will use the document linked below to begin the exploration:

NIST AI Consortium

Use the login credentials at the upper right of our home page

The Quick Brown Fox – Tokenization Example

Original English Sentence:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

1. Tokenization

Tokens: ["The", " quick", " brown", " fox", " jumps", " over", " the", " lazy", " dog", "."]

2. Token IDs (Numbers fed to the AI model)

Token Token ID
The 464
quick 2068
brown 7583
fox 1776
jumps 18045
over 625
the 262
lazy 16925
dog 3290
. 13

Final Input to the AI Model:

[464, 2068, 7583, 1776, 18045, 625, 262, 16925, 3290, 13]

Background:

The model only sees this list of numbers. It has no direct understanding of English words anymore — it learned patterns from billions of examples during training using these number sequences.This numerical input then goes through embeddings (turning numbers into vectors), attention layers, etc., to generate a response.  Most widely used tokenizers (e.g., OpenAI’s tiktoken, Llama’s, etc.) are trained primarily on English-heavy datasets (often 60–90%+ English in pre-training corpora).

Outcome:

    • Better compression for English — Common English words and patterns become single tokens or short subwords.
    • Worse efficiency for other languages — Non-English text often gets fragmented into more tokens (sometimes 2–5× more for the same semantic content).

Impact:

    • Higher token counts = higher API costs and shorter effective context windows for non-English users.
    • Poorer downstream performance on non-English tasks.
    • English becomes the “cheapest” and often “best-performing” language for prompting and reasoning.

Studies consistently show this “tokenization tax” or “language premium”: English typically has the lowest token-per-character or token-per-meaning ratio in major models.

Bias:

    • Multilingual models still underperform on low-resource languages.
    • It reinforces English as the default language for AI development.
    • It affects fairness, accessibility, and global adoption.

Efforts to fix this include dedicated multilingual tokenizers, language-specific fine-tuning, and more balanced approaches. However, because English dominates training data and benchmarks, it remains the practical standard that everything else is measured against.

Tokenization isn’t language-neutral — it’s heavily skewed toward English due to data realities. This is one of the core reasons why “English-first” prompting often works best in today’s LLMs.

 

* StandardsMichigan.COM normally deals with Language issues every Monday at least once per month.

How Your LLM Costs 5X More If You Don’t Speak English

Same content, 65% more expensive in Chinese! Cross-model tokenization comparison: Claude users pay the highest ‘Chinese tax’

Innovation and Competitiveness in Artificial Intelligence

NIST Expands AI Consortium’s Scope, Calls for New Members

 

The International Trade Administration (ITA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) is requesting public comments to gain insights on the current global artificial intelligence (AI) market. Responses will provide clarity about stakeholder concerns regarding international AI policies, regulations, and other measures which may impact U.S. exports of AI technologies. Additionally, the request for information (RFI) includes inquiries related to AI standards development. ANSI encourages relevant stakeholders to respond by ITA’s deadline of October 17, 2022.

Fueling U.S. Innovation and Competitiveness in AI: Respond to International Trade Administration’s Request for Information

Commerce Department Launches the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee

 

Image

Morgan Wallen

Crowd Safety | Outdoor Event Electrotechnologies









Abiit sed non oblita

“Whom the gods love, die young.”
Menander (341-290 BCE)

“My mother was a Protestant, of a traditional American, vague kind: she belonged to the church that the nice people in the neighbourhood went to. My wife is a Catholic, the kids are Catholic, so I’m a Catholic fellow-traveller.”

Legacy | Toledo Ohio

“Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.”

“America wasn’t founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased.”

MLive | Ann Arbor Michigan

“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”

“It’s better to spend money like there’s no tomorrow than to spend tonight like there’s no money.”

Rolling Stone

“When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”

“If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.”

“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”

“Not much was really invented during the Renaissance, if you don’t count modern civilization.”

“No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it’s probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.”

 

Amphitheaters

University of Virginia — McIntire Amphitheatre
Concordia University Irvine — Nelson Amphitheatre
University of Houston — Wilhelmina’s Grove Amphitheater

“Panoramic View of the Greek Amphitheatre at Syracuse” 18th Century Abraham Louis Rodolphe Ducros

From from time to time — particularly in the months of fairer weather, when many events are hosted outdoors — we break form from the grind of responding to c0nsultations to simply enjoy these spaces  See our CALENDAR for our periodic Lively c0lloquia when we drill down into technical specifics.

서울대학교

Outdoor amphitheaters rely upon a broad ecosystem of consensus standards that quietly support every performance.  Among them:

  • NFPA — National Electrical Code, including Articles 518, 520, 525 and related provisions
  • SMPTE — media production and broadcast systems
  • Audio Engineering Society (AES) — professional sound systems
  • Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) — site and performance lighting
  • ASTM International — seating, concrete, accessibility and materials
  • ASCE — structural loading for stages, roofs and canopies

 

Outdoor Events

University of Melbourne (Architect rendering of project in process)

Furman University

High Point University

George Fox University Oregon

Globe Theater / Southern Utah University

Point Loma Nazarene University

Augusta University / Georgia

Singapore Management University

Swarthmore College

Silliman University Amphitheater / The Phillippines

University of Colorado

South Dakota State University

University of Mary Washington / Virginia

California State University San Marcos

Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro

Clemson University

University of Virginia

College of Idaho Centennial Amphitheater

Texas Woman’s University

Swarthmore College

Pomona College

Oakland University Meadowbrook Theater / Rochester, Michigan

More coming

LEARN MORE:

Open Air Audio

 

Outdoor Events

“Panoramic View of the Greek Amphitheatre at Syracuse” / Abraham Louis Rodolphe Ducros (18th Century)

Today at 15:00 UTC explore best practice literature for outdoor events in cross-cutting fashion; refreshing our understanding about how we make such events in academic settings safe, sustainable and successful.   Use the login credentials at the upper right of our home page.

Bleachers, Folding Seating & Grandstands

Audio Standards

Amphitheaters

Audiovisual Experiences

Lightning Protection Systems

Rain & Lightning

Sport Scoreboards

Form v. Function | Function v. Form

Audio and Music Engineering

Virtual reality technology in evacuation simulation of sport stadiums

 

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