Microsoft awards grants to improve datacenter operations and efficiency
The Software Engineering Innovation Foundation (SEIF), which is funded by Microsoft Research, announced on Wednesday that it had awarded twelve $40,000 research grants "to support academic research in software engineering technologies, tools, practices, and teaching methods." For the first time the winners include four that are focused on the areas of datacenter operation and energy efficiency.
The four datacenter research award winners and their academic institutions, from the more than 100 proposals from worldwide applicants, are:
Christoforos Kozyrakis
Stanford University, United States
Project: Resource Efficient Cloud Computing
Onur Mutlu
Carnegie Mellon University, United States
Project: Improving Datacenter Efficiency and Total Cost of Ownership with Differentiated Software Reliability Analysis and Techniques
Thu Nguyen
Rutgers University, United States
Project: Cool Provision: Provisioning of Cooling Systems for Datacenters
Reinaldo Tonkoski and Wei Sun
South Dakota State University, United States
Project: Reliable and Resilient Microgrids for Datacenters
As Sean James, Senior Research Program Manager, Microsoft Global Foundation Services said in his blog announcing the grants, “The subject matter builds on our commitment to energy innovation and sustainability and we see the results of this research benefiting not only Microsoft, but the industry as a whole.”
The complete list of 2014 SEIF award winners, in areas as diverse as Yuriy Brun’s Augmenting Testing with Performance-Aware Behavioral Models project and Jeffrey Haddad and Jessica Huber’s Microsoft Kinect-based training program to improve balance, mobility, and quality of life in patients with Parkinson's disease, can be found on the Microsoft Research awards site.