Google announced that the University Asst. Computer Science Prof. Sudhanva Gurumurthi is among the recipients of its Focus Research Awards yesterday, which total $5.7 million of unrestricted grant money to fund 12 projects at 10 different academic institutions.
The grant money will be divided among four areas of interest to both Google and the research community: machine learning; mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring; energy efficiency in computing; and privacy, said Sean Carlson, Global Communication and Public Affairs manager at Google.
The awards are partly geared toward promoting projects that investigate energy efficiency in both hardware and software design, he added.
"As more people use cloud computing, all this information is processed somewhere," Carlson said. "These places are called data centers, and some of the research Google is investing in will aim to make these data centers as energy efficient as possible, which is beneficial from both a green and business perspective."
Gurumurthi's research team specifically focuses on massive data centers that house common Internet applications, such as Facebook or Google, he said.
"We want to design computer hardware so that it adapts its energy consumption to the amount of work that needs to be done instead of running at full capacity when it is not being used," he said.
Gurumurthi will split $1.5 million with three other researchers from Rutgers, the University of Michigan and the University of Santa Barbara for their work on computer energy efficiency.
"We are really excited to be working on this project with several different institutions," Gurumurthi said.
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