Please join us for a special research seminar speaker: UVM President Garimella. President Garimella will present a talk on Energy Use in Information and Communications Technologies: The Role of Thermal Management. Feel free to arrive early for coffee, tea and treats!

Abstract: Data centers account for a significant and growing fraction of the worldwide electricity demand, owing to the rapid proliferation of electronics and the associated digital data generation. Despite this rapid growth in total energy consumption, the largely ad hoc approaches to space conditioning in large data centers and server farms have led to unconscionable inefficiencies that are now driving information technology companies to seek ways to lower their overall energy footprint. The sheer magnitude of heat dissipation in these large-scale computing facilities is staggering, and calls for urgent improvement of data center cooling strategies, which consume a significant fraction of the total energy used at the facility level. In particular, technologies that allow for increases in the data center operating temperature have the potential to eliminate energy-intensive air-conditioning systems and enable year-round rejection of waste heat to the ambient. Liquid cooling offers a low-thermal-resistance heat-rejection approach that may enable such operation without increasing the temperature of the electronic devices. Embedding liquid coolant channels directly in electronic devices offers further potential improvement in efficiency and performance scaling by enabling dramatic changes in the system architecture, such as 3D chip stacking. This talk will review key challenges encountered in the thermal management of information technology equipment at different scales, from data centers down to small-scale portable electronics, as well as recent technological developments related to embedded liquid-cooling strategies that may enable significant energy savings and performance gains.

Learn more about Suresh V. Garimella

About this recurring event series: Students in Mechanical Engineering are joined weekly by various speakers on a wide array of topics. Updated information (and location) will be posted regularly. Check back soon!