Minjie Chen, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, and his team are building a family of devices to dramatically reduce power consumption at the gigantic data centers that serve as the backbone of internet services and cloud computing.
Minjie Chen, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, and his team are building a family of devices to dramatically reduce power consumption at the gigantic data centers that serve as the backbone of internet services and cloud computing.
These centers, each holding racks of computer servers, consume 90 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year in the United States. The video above shows how the team’s technology improves the process by which power is converted from electrical grid, which uses a 480-volt alternating current, to the 5-volt-or-lower direct current needed for central processing units (CPUs) and hard drives.
In today’s data centers, this process happens at each computer, sapping about 40% of the original energy. The new device aggregates power conversion into one unit, and then distributes that power. The team estimates that they can increase the energy efficiency of the power-delivery system by 60% to 88%.
Read more at Princeton University
