David Meisner Receives Yahoo! 2011 Key Scientific Challenges (KSC) Program Award

CSE PhD Candidate David Meisner has received a Yahoo! 2011 Key Scientific Challenges (KSC) Program Award from Yahoo! Labs. The KSC Program provides support for graduate students who are conducting research in one of Yahoo’s core research areas; in this case, Green Computing.

David’s award is for his work in researching technologies for use in reducing energy consumption at data centers. He is the lead student researcher for PowerNap, a server architecture which eliminates idle power. In observed deployments, these servers can save as much as 74% of a server’s energy usage. PowerNap operates by transitioning rapidly between a high-performance active state during periods of work and a coordinated low-power nap state while idle. This architecture provides greater power savings than other power management techniques, such as dynamic voltage and frequency scaling, while incurring negligible performance overhead.

David works with Professor Thomas F. Wenisch in the Advanced Computer Architecture Lab (ACAL). His research focuses on energy efficiency in large scale data centers, multi-core computer architecture, and power-performance modeling.