Newsletter: Winter 2010
Greetings!
As the Institute for Energy Efficiency celebrates its second successful year this month, exciting news keeps pouring in and shows no signs of slowing down. Hot off the press, Google awarded a two year, $1 Million grant to a team led by the Institute's Computing Solutions Group Head Fred Chong for research on saving power in data centers.
I would also like to congratulate one of our faculty members, Shuji Nakamura, on winning the 2009 Harvey Prize for advancements in science and technology, awarded by the Technion - the Israeli Institute of Technology. The prize was awarded for his contributions to LED research, among them the creation of the first white light LED.
Nakamura and other lighting experts and stakeholders come together February 9th in an Institute-sponsored business forum to discuss challenges and solutions to accelerating widespread adoption of LED lighting. An open-door Executive Roundtable Discussion held at the end of the day will explore public policy measures for accelerating the adoption of LED lighting, moderated by Noah Horowitz, Principal Scientist of the National Resource Defense Council. We invite you to attend this unique and thought-provoking event.
Kind Regards,
Dan Colbert
Research Insights
Google Awards $1 Million For University Research Effort To Slash Energy Consumption In Internet Data Centers
Google Inc. has awarded a two-year, $1 million research grant aimed at slashing energy usage in large Internet data centers to a team of computer scientists that include lead investigators Fred Chong and Ricardo Bianchini of the Greenscale Center for Energy-Efficient Computing. The team will explore ways to create low power modes in servers, aiming to conserve 40 to 50 percent of the power that servers currently consume.
The project goal is to allow less active servers to move their processing loads to other servers and essentially go to sleep. But information on the sleeping servers' memories must still be instantly accessible. In current computer designs, data requests go through a memory controller that is part of the central processing unit (CPU). If that CPU is asleep, it cannot provide that access. One proposal is to redesign CPUs with a separate power feed to the memory controller, allowing it to perform the needed memory management functions while the rest of the CPU stays asleep.
"Greenscale will provide critical infrastructure to the project with the planned construction of the Greenscale Experimental Datacenter, a state-of-the-art miniature data center where systems researchers can conduct radical experiments not possible in production data centers," said Chong, director of the Center.
Read about the Google Award
Faculty News
Nakamura wins Harvey Prize for LED Lighting advancements
Lighting pioneer Shuji Nakamura of UC Santa Barbara has been named one of the two winners of the 2009 Harvey Prize for advancements in science and technology.
Nakamura was chosen for the Harvey Prize for "his seminal contributions to light sources based on nitride containing III-V semiconductors. Professor Nakamura pioneered the research that led to the first semiconductor laser producing blue emission, which increases significantly the density of optical storage devices. His work on nitride containing light emitting diodes led eventually to the white light LED, which totally revolutionized lighting concepts."
Read more...
Institute News
Steve Koonin Stresses Need for Alternative Energy Resources at Energy Leadership Lecture
Steve Koonin, Undersecretary of Science for the U.S. Department of Energy, visited UC Santa Barbara on January 15th as an Institute for Energy Efficiency guest speaker. Early in the day, Koonin met with IEE and CEEM-affiliated faculty to learn about energy-related research on campus. In the afternoon, he gave a public lecture about the United States' approach to sustainability, and shared his thoughts on what the future holds. "Global development and population growth will place unprecedented stresses on resources," Koonin said. "These same factors will have a profound influence on U.S. domestic and global circumstances. Navigating these changes will be a major task of the next decades."