A faculty member at Rochester Institute of Technology has received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award expected to total $596,512 over five years.
The five-year grant award to Amlan Ganguly is being used to further explore the design of energy-efficient data centers using a communication infrastructure with wireless interconnections, according to RIT.
Ganguly said this process projects 10 times the energy savings of current usage.
According to RIT, data centers are warehouse-scale computers comprising thousands of individual servers used by organizations to store, manage and process data. In the United States, data centers consume nearly 91 billion kilowatt hours of energy, according to a 2013 survey by the National Resource Defense Council. That usage is expected to increase to 140 billion kilowatt hours annually by 2020, RIT said.
Ganguly’s work using wireless frequencies could significantly reduce a data center’s energy use.
“It is important to reduce that energy footprint of computing in the data center because it is so high,” Ganguly, an assistant professor of computer engineering, said in a statement. “The crux of the approach is to replace the legacy internet-type of connections with the novel wireless technology, which we project to be significantly more power-efficient than the current state-of-the-art.”