NSF Workshop on Sustainable Data Centers

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Data centers are the core of modern business environments as computation has been rapidly moving into the cloud in the last decade. Data centers are among the fastest growing users of electricity in the U.S. consuming an estimated 91 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2013, about 2% of the total electricity consumed by the US. It is essential that data centers be operated effectively to improve energy efficiency and environmental sustainability. Due to aggressive adoption of cloud-based computing, the demands on data centers are growing rapidly, and both academia and industry will need to rethink how data centers are designed, built, and operated to be sustainable. This award will support the organization of a workshop to bring together industry practitioners, academic researchers, and government stakeholders to discuss the vision, challenges, and opportunities for sustainable data center research for the next 5-10 years. The research agenda of the workshop has the potential for broad and transformative impact on the US and beyond by finding new ways to make better use of energy and natural resources in the nation's computing infrastructure. Furthermore, the workshop will engage early career scholars and those from diverse backgrounds and underrepresented groups to connect them with a broad community of academic and industrial researchers interested in data center sustainability.