EPF Lausanne announced today the launch of the ecocloud consortium. The consortium brings several EPFL laboratories together to tackle the skyrocketing electricity demands of Internet data processing centers.
At EPFL, twelve laboratories are joining their expertise to form the ecocloud consortium, launched today in a special event at the Rolex Learning Center. Its objective is to work on reducing the amount of energy these centers consume.
Ecocloud’s research is organized around three axes: data, energy and intelligence. Promising ideas are already being explored; for example, research into directly cooling processors as a function of the jobs they are doing at a given time; and constructing a “vertical” system in which the memory sits above the processor, in order to increase and optimize the flow of information between them.
As evidence of the economic potential of its research, ecocloud already has several industry partners: Credit Suisse, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle, Swisscom and Intel. The consortium has secured additional funding from programs in Switzerland (nano-tera) and Europe. “Thanks to the support and expertise of our scientists, we are in a position to become a recognized center of excellence at the European level in the domain of Cloud Computing,” says Babak Falsafi, head of EPFL’s Parallel Systems Architecture Laboratory (PARSA).
