Building & Design

Google invests $1 million in energy efficient data centre research

Google has awarded $1 million to a two-year research project aimed at radically reducing the amount of energy used by large Internet data centres.

The project, which could receive an additional $500,000 for a third year, will be carries out by a team of computer scientists from the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), Rutgers University, the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia.

The team are part of UCSB’s Greenscale Center for Energy-Efficient Computing.

The award is part of a $5.7 million investment by Google into 12 university-based research projects and is the largest for computing efficiency.

The computer scientists will look for ways to allow parts of a computer to go to sleep while others remain active. All the information in the servers’ memories, whether asleep or active, has to remain instantly accessible, however.

This is tricky to achieve with current computer designs because all data requests are processed through the memory controller in the central processing unit (CPU). If the CPU is asleep, there is no access to data. So the project will look at redesigning the CPU to provide a separate power supply to the memory controlled.

“Data centres have to be built to handle the highest anticipated demand, but most of the time, they are only running between 20-50% of capacity,” explains Ricardo Bianchini of Rutgers. “Servers in these centres consume about the same amount of energy whether their workload is low or high.”

The project will aim to reduce the power consumption of data centre servers by 40-50%.

For further information:
http://iee.ucsb.edu/greenscale/
www.ucsb.edu/
www.rutgers.edu/
www.umich.edu/
www.virginia.edu/

05 February 2010

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