Bangalore: A team of scientists from several U.S. universities has proposed to redesign a server CPU to give a separate power feed to the chip's memory controller, for which Google is giving them $1 million, reports Datacenter Dynamics.
This would enable the rest of the chip to be powered down when idle, while only the controller stays on to make the unit quickly accessible if needed. The idea is one of several proposals for a new Google funded research project aiming to develop new low-power modes in servers, whereby the maximum possible amount of server components gets powered down when the machine is idling.
Earlier this week, the search giant awarded $1 million to the project, a collaboration of computer scientists from University of California Santa Barbara, Rutgers University, University of Michigan and University of Virginia, according to a Rutgers statement. The two-year grant may be extended by one more year and an additional $500,000.
The team of researchers will work with UCSB's Greenscale Center for Energy-Efficient Computing. "Greenscale will provide critical infrastructure to the project with the planned construction of the Greenscale Experimental Datacenter, a state-of-the-art miniature datacenter where systems researchers can conduct radical experiments not possible in production datacenters," said Fred Chong, Professor of computer science at UCSB and the center's director.
While Google has been giving out research grants in the past, at a rate of about 150 grants per year, the grants it awarded this week were much larger than the ones issued previously. This week's awards, representing the first round of the company's new Google Focused Research Awards, totaled $5.7 million. Grants were awarded to scientists working in one of four areas: machine learning, the use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring, energy efficiency in computing, and privacy.
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