The green tech edition of ‘what I did on my summer vacation’

How would you like to spend your summer break doing some groundbreaking green technology research?

IBM has hired a couple of hundred college students worldwide to lend their brains to projects across the company’s 13 research labs, including several focused on solving problems related to making data centers more green. Heck, the more minds the merrier, I always say. It’s the tenth year of this incubator program but the first year that IBM has pulled in students for some of its green tech projects, according to Steve Dale, manager of the IBM Extreme Blue internship program.

“These students bring fresh perspective to these problems,” Dale says.

Among the green tech projects that some of the interns are working on this summer are Project BlueGreen, which is focusing on software and other technologies that can collect and serve up information about power-related data for data center environments, especially those that are virtualized. Another effort, called Project Power Partition, is looking at system level technologies to better manage machine workloads and consumption against a business' energy budget requirements.

Ryan Holt, who is working on his bachelor of science in computer science at Calvin College, says his school places a big emphasis on being “stewards of the world we live in,” which is one of the reasons he looked to IBM for an internship.

“I was delighted to find I would have the chance to do something meaningful,” Holt says, adding, “All of our work will be integrated with other applications.”

Perry Jones, an MBA candidate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who is angling to land a post-graduate position at IBM, says he also looked to the company because he wanted to explore technology from a practical standpoint. “It’s not like the work that these engineers are doing will be put on a shelf. This will be in the next generation of products,” he says.

Sounds like a pretty good start for a post-graduate green tech resume.