Google Awards $1M Research Grant To Reduce Energy Use In Data Centers
from the one-miiiillion-dollars dept
Google has awarded a $1 million dollar research grant to a team of researchers from the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), Rutgers University, the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia in order to develop methods to cut energy consumption in large data centers. This 2-year grant is part of a $5.7 million effort on behalf of Google to provide University funds for researching areas of interest to the company. The research grant will be further divided up to fund a bunch of approaches, and it could be renewed for a third year based on the progress of the teams.One of the project leaders, Ricardo Bianchini, a computer science professor at Rutgers, claims that many large data centers are only using 20-50% of their capacity, yet they "consume about the same amount of energy whether their workload is low or high." His team is closely looking at ways to put systems to sleep at times of low activity, yet keep their data instantly accessible. Because current computers require the central processing to be powered in order for memory to be accessed, these scientists are proposing a separate power feed to the memory controller, allowing the rest of the CPU to stay asleep, conserving 40-50% of the power consumed by current servers. The research team members will conduct the experiments at the Greenscale Experimental Datacenter, where changes can be made that would not be possible in normal production data centers.
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