16:198:500 section 02 (Index 27401) Light Seminar in Computer Science

Data Center Energy Management

Time and Location: Fridays from 1 to 2pm in CoRE A

Instructor: Ricardo Bianchini (ricardob@cs.rutgers.edu)
Term: Fall 2009

Overview

As of 2006, the data centers in the United States consumed 61.4 Billion KWhs per year, an amount of energy that is equivalent to that consumed by the entire transportation manufacturing industry (the industry that makes airplanes, ships, cars, trucks, and other means of transportation). Worse, under current energy-efficiency trends, this gigantic amount of energy is expected to double until 2011 for an overall electricity cost of $7.4 Billion per year. These enormous energy consumptions translate into large financial strains for businesses, difficult and expensive infrastructure challenges for power utility companies, and large greenhouse-gas footprints that contribute to climate change. Given these serious problems, data center energy management has become a highly visible research area with an increasing level of activity. This light seminar will cover many of the main research works in this area. Participation in the seminar will involve reading, presenting, and discussing research papers. These activities may lead to ideas for MSc essays or PhD theses on this topic.

Prerequisites

Students should be highly motivated to read, present, and discuss a wide selection of research papers.

Expected Work

The workload will be one or two research papers per week. Besides reading and discussing all papers, each student will be required to give one or two presentations during the course of the seminar.

Announcements

Tentative list of topics, papers, and presentations