Google Enlisting University Help in Cutting Data Center Energy Bills

Published February 09, 2010

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — Google last week announced it was expanding its research relationship with universities across the United States with its first Focused Research Awards.

The awards, totaling $5.7 million were presented to researchers at 10 universities working "in areas of study that are of key interest to Google as well as the research community," according to a blog post by Alfred Spector, Google's Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives.

Of the 12 research projects receiving funding, two have some environmental components, including one conducted at the University of Washington and the University of California, Los Angeles, that explores the use of mobile phones to collect data for environmental and health monitoring.

The largest of the grants, totaling $1 million over two years with the possibility of an additional $500,000 for a third year, goes to researchers at Rutgers University, UC Santa Barbara, the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia, working on energy-efficient computing topics.

According to a writeup about the grants on EnergyEfficiencyNews.com:

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%.

Last year, Google unveiled some of the details of its super-secret server design at a data center energy efficiency summit, and the company has long aimed to boost energy efficiency by as much as possible in its data centers.

More about Google's research awards is online at the Google Blog.

_{Campus photo CC-licensed by Flickr user}_KevinDooley_.

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