PIs: Associate Professor Mung Chiang and Professor Margaret Martonosi, Department of Electrical Engineering; Assistant Professor Michael Freedman and Professor Jennifer Rexford, Department of Computer Science

Information technology consumes 2.5% of the world’s electricity, translating to one billion tons of CO2 produced annually. In the United States, data centers alone consume more than 60 billion kilowatt hours a year—equivalent to the consumption of the entire transportation manufacturing sector. Under current efficiency trends, this gigantic amount of energy will nearly double by 2011 for an overall electricity cost of $7.4 billion per year. IT plays a crucial role in reducing other sources of energy consumption by enabling remote collaboration in lieu of frequent travel and by providing energy monitoring and sensing technologies. These activities lead to further demands on the world’s computing and communications infrastructure even as society’s “greening” continues.

In this project, the research team will investigate how to reduce IT energy consumption from an end‐to-end perspective‐ from the mobile phone to the data center. Their goal is to initiate a comprehensive research area on Green IT, to help meet the target of reducing IT energy consumption by over one‐third without damaging the economic productivity offered by IT and to make the ever more pervasive IT products increasingly green. The researchers will draw on their expertise in computer architecture, communication networks and wide‐area services, drawing on both theoretical techniques and systems prototyping.