Srivastava receives NSF grant for thermal management in data storage centers

• Srivastava
• chip
• thermal management

Associate Professor Ankur Srivastava (ECE/ISR) is a co-PI for a three-year, $900K National Science Foundation grant, "Optimization Algorithms for Large-scale, Thermal-aware Storage Systems." Professor Samir Khuller (CS/UMIACS) is the principal investigator, while Assistant Professor Amol Deshpande (CS/UMIACS) also is a co-PI.

The researchers will investigate optimization problems that arise when managing the thermal requirements of very large data storage centers. Such storage centers contain hundreds of thousands of consistently active hard disks and other components, which produce a lot of heat, resulting in significant cooling costs. Cooling mechanisms and workload assignments in a storage center are intricately tied together.

This project seeks to develop a general science of thermal management for large scale storage systems, by focusing on thermal modeling and management at different levels of the system hierarchy. The researchers will develop thermal awareness techniques for:

— allocating data access tasks to specific disks on which data is located;

— controlling the schedules and speeds of thousands of tasks and disks to optimize quality of service; and

— reorganizing data layouts on disks.

This project will enable better thermal management in data storage centers, resulting in significant reductions in the carbon footprint caused by large data storage centers.

Published October 6, 2009