PNNL

Neeraj Kumar can see the boundless potential of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. He is optimistic that AI will lead to an improved world.

Kumar, a chief data scientist in the Advanced Computing, Mathematics, and Data Division at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), also can see a complete picture. That vision includes massive energy consumption by data centers now and even more in the future. 

“We are going to run out of power if we continue to build data centers at our current pace,” said Kumar. “Data is going to explode exponentially for the next few years. To keep up, we need to develop energy-efficient hardware that can handle this surge without increasing energy consumption.”

Kumar is no stranger to addressing the big questions in AI, data, and computing. As a keynote speaker at the AI Hardware & Systems Summit in September 2024, he joined a distinguished lineup of tech industry panelists to discuss “The Future of Generative AI and LLM Agents.” 

He recognizes the power of good in computing. Kumar and his PNNL team are part of the Cancer Distributed Learning Environment (CANDLE) project. The team, in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory, developed a method to improve the AI-based prediction of drug responses during cancer treatment. Kumar presented his results at the Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing Conference in June 2004 in Zurich, Switzerland. He is also a PNNL lead and and one of the cofounders of the Trillion Parameter Consortium, and in September 2024 gave a distinguished seminar on “AI Agents: Unleashing the power of superintelligence” for the TPC global community. 

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PNNL Staff Bio

Listen to TechArena podcast as Neeraj Kumar discusses AI's role in scientific discovery, energy-efficient computing, agentic workflow, and collaboration with industry to advance memory systems for AI and high-performance computing.

Read TechArena story about Neeraj Kumar’s work.