Datacenters provide the supporting infrastructure for a wide range of economic activities based on digital information. As such, they are extremely important drivers of economic growth. They are also at the center of societal changes enabling new media for cyber-social interactions. However, the continued growth of datacenters is now hindered by their unsustainable and rising energy needs. Aprt from datacenter energy consumption and associated costs, corporations and goverments are also concerned about the environmental impact of datacenters, in terms of their CO2 footprint. In my talk I will describe a number of techniques for improving the energy efficiency of enterprise computing platforms and datacenters ranging from task scheduling and server consolidation to combined power and cooling optimizations and adaptive control algorithms built on a variety of mathematical optimization frameworks.

Massoud Pedram received a B.S. degree in Caltech in 1986 and a Ph.D. degree in EECS from UC-Berkeley in 1991. He joined the department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California in 1991 where he is currently a full professor. Dr. Pedram has served on the technical program committee of many technical conferences, including the Design Automation Conference, and the Design and Test in Europe Conference. He co-founded and served as the Technical Chair and General Chair of the Int'l Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design in 1996 and 1997, respectively. His research has received a number of awards in cluding two ICCD Best Papers, two DAC Best Papers, an IEEE T-VLSI Best Paper, and an IEEE T-CAS-II Best Paper. He is a recipeint of the NSF's Young Investigator Award (1994) and the Presidential Faculty Fellows Award (1996). Dr. Pedram, who is a Fellow of the IEEE, currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems. His current work of focuses on low power electronics and energy-efficient information processing systems.