Abstract: Datacenters are rapidly increasing in size and computational ability. However, this growth places great stress on the power delivery and heat removal of the datacenter. The cost of power and cooling, and the computational capacity of the datacenter, are both driven by the peak demands on the power infrastructure and the cooling infrastructure, even though most datacenters see large differences between the peak demand and the average demand. We will discuss two technologies that enable the datacenter to service the peak computational demand, yet present the power and cooling infrastructure with a flat profile that hides the peaks, without sacrificing peak-period performance. We make use of batteries and phase-change materials (e.g., wax) for these optimizations.

Short Bio: Dean Tullsen is a professor and chair of the computer science and engineering department at University of California, San Diego. He received his PhD from the University of Washington in 1996, where he introduced simultaneous multithreading (hyper-threading). He has continued to work in the area of computer architecture and back-end compilation, where with various co-authors he has introduced many new ideas to the research community, including threaded multipath execution, symbiotic job scheduling for multithreaded processors, dynamic critical path prediction, speculative precomputation, heterogeneous multi-core architectures, conjoined core architectures, event-driven simultaneous code optimization, and data triggered threads. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE. He has twice won the Influential ISCA Paper Award.