Data Center Research Added to Grant Program

Research teams from around the world have been awarded $40,000 grants to create more energy efficient data centers.

The Software Engineering Innovation Foundation (SEIF) receives funding from Microsoft for the grants, according to a blog post from the Global Foundation Services.

Microsoft says it is looking to find ways to transform the energy supply chain toward greater efficiency and reduced environmental impact.

Each year Microsoft issues a Request for Proposals for the SEIF research teams across the world to support academic research in software engineering technologies, tools, practices, and teaching methods. The scope was expanded to include applications related to datacenter innovation and energy efficiency.

“These grants will fund teams from four different universities to study innovations in all areas of datacenter operations, among other areas of software engineering and Internet of Things,” wrote Sean James, Global Foundation Services Senior Research Program Manager.

The four datacenter research award winners are:

1. Christoforos Kozyrakis, Stanford University, Project: Resource Efficient Cloud Computing,
2. Onur Mutlu, Carnegie Mellon University, Project: Improving Datacenter Efficiency and Total Cost of Ownership with Differentiated Software Reliability Analysis and Techniques,
3. Thu Nguyen,Rutgers University, Project: Cool Provision: Provisioning of Cooling Systems for Datacenters,
4. Reinaldo Tonkoski and Wei Sun, South Dakota State University, Project: Reliable and Resilient Microgrids for Datacenters.

More than 100 proposals from around 30 countries worldwide applied for the research grants.