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Sudhanva Gurumurthi, UVA Computer Science professor, received a million-dollar research award from Google this February. |
During the first round of Google’s $5.7 million Focused Research Awards, split among 31 professors at 10 universities, Sudhanva Gurumurthi won a bit of green for his green-mindedness. Gurumurthi, an assistant professor in UVA’s Department of Computer Science who teaches nine courses, received the largest of grants given to energy-efficient computing projects, an award of $1 million.
At only 31, Gurumurthi has already received two other research awards from Google—but, he explains, never one of this size. “Our award is part of a new large-scale funding piloted this year,” he says. Gurumurthi’s research team, consisting of three other professors from various colleges, will receive the money over two years, with the prospect of an additional $500,000 for a potential third year.
With his collaborators, Gurumurthi is looking to redesign computer hardware so that the amount of energy consumed is proportional to the amount of work the hardware performs. Currently, computers don’t follow this principle of “energy proportionality,” and use as much energy when idle as when they are working. Gurumurthi’s team hopes to improve the energy efficiency of data centers, from memory to disks.
“High data center energy usage provides a high level of motivation for the award,” says Gurumurthi. “Data centers are becoming more and more important, as there are more Internet-based applications, like Google and Facebook.”
