Making Enterprise Computing Green: Energy-Efficiency Challenges in Enterprise Data Centers

Enterprise data centers consume an alarmingly-high fraction of the world's energy. The total carbon footprint of the world's data centers is roughly the same as the CO2 emissions of the entire Czech Republic. In the US, the EPA estimates that data center energy consumption will reach over 100 billion kWh by 2011, 2.5% of domestic power generation (more than the nation's color televisions), resulting in an estimated annual electricity cost of $7.4 billion. Improving the energy efficiency of enterprise computing is a critical challenge for computer systems research.

In this tutorial, I will describe the architecture of a typical data center with a particular focus on power-provisioning and cooling infrastructure, introduce key challenges to data center energy efficiency, and survey some promising approaches toward addressing these challenges.

I will close with a discussion of recent results and ongoing research at the University of Michigan that seeks to address the enterprise computing energy-efficiency challenge.
Thomas Wenisch is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, specializing in computer architecture. Tom's prior research includes memory streaming for commercial server applications, store-wait-free multiprocessor memory systems and rigorous sampling-based performance evaluation methodologies. He is a principle developer of the Flexus full-system cycle-accurate simulation infrastructure. His ongoing work focuses on data center architecture, energy-efficient server design, and multi-core / multiprocessor memory systems. Prior to his academic career, Tom was a software developer at American Power Conversion, where he worked on data center thermal topology estimation. He is co-inventor on three patents. Tom received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.