July 10, 2009
ECE graduate student Luca Parolini has won an APC Fellowship for Data Center Efficiency Research.
Data centers account for nearly 1.5% of total electricity consumption in the U.S. at a cost of approximately $4.5 billion per year. Parolini's research will lead to innovations in data center management developing a unified, thermal-computational control scheme that implements the most appropriate trade-off between minimizing power consumption and satisfying complex workload demands. More broadly, his research will lead to new approaches to the hierarchical, distributed control of large-scale cyber-physical systems.
Parilini proposes a control scheme based on a holistic and modular approach that supports: compositional modeling to address alternative data center architectures, multi-scale temporal and spatial abstractions and decompositions, stochastic influences from the environment and workloads, extensibility to incorporate emerging technologies (e.g., solid-state storage, liquid cooling), and direct control of customer-specific performance. The derived control strategies will leverage degrees of freedom that are not currently considered as variables that can be manipulated to improve data center efficiency.
Bruce Krogh
Bruno Sinopoli