Srivastava Receives Grant for Thermal Management in Data Storage Centers

Prof. Ankur Srivastava

Associate Professor Ankur Srivastava is a Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI) on a new National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant, titled "Optimization Algorithms for Large-scale, Thermal-aware Storage Systems." Dr. Samir Khuller of the University of Maryland's Department of Computer Science (CS) is the Principal Investigator (PI) on the grant, while Dr. Amol Deshpande (CS) will also serve as a Co-PI. The three-year grant is worth over $900,000.

The researchers will investigate optimization problems that arise while performing thermal management in very large data storage centers. To satisfy the growing data management needs, such storage centers contain possibly hundreds of thousands of hard disks and other components, and typically are consistently active. These generate a lot of heat, and hence the storage system must be cooled to maintain reliability, resulting in significant cooling costs. The cooling mechanism and the workload assignments in a storage center are intricately tied together.

This project seeks to develop a general science of thermal management for large scale storage systems, by focusing on thermal modeling and management at different levels of the system hierarchy. Thermal aware techniques for allocating data access tasks to specific disks on which data is located, for controlling the schedules and speeds of thousands of tasks and disks to optimize quality of service, and for reorganizing data layouts on disks are being developed. This project will enable better thermal management in data storage centers, which can potentially result in significant reductions in the carbon footprint caused by large data storage centers.

Published October 5, 2009